VisualHub: Keeping Up With Apple

With many different video codecs and formats available today, it is hard to find a device that supports not just them all, but even a reasonable subset of the most popular.

When Apple released the 5G iPod with Video in Oct 2005, the push to take your video content on the road began and new tools started to surface to convert many of the different codecs over to iPod format.

Since AppleTV’s initial release a year ago, the second wave has become the push to move content into the living room. Leading the pack on the Mac platform is VisualHub from Techspansion. MacApper originally reviewed VisualHub back in April of 2007. With this post we’ll revisit VisualHub to see how far it has come in the race to keep up with Apple.

In less than one year Apple has released not just the iPhone and AppleTV ‘take 2′, but also revised the iPod line with the latest iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch. Along the way, VisualHub has been quick to release updates to support each of the Apple releases and updates. VisualHub provides fast conversion from nearly every video format to iPod/iPhone/AppleTV, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG and Flash.

Conversions can be scaled to desired resolutions, cropped, and audio modified. Formats to view directly on television support both NTSC (North America/Japan) and PAL (Europe/everywhere else). All MPEG formats are supported, including MPEG-2. H.264 is supported when converting to MPEG-4 or any of the iTunes supported devices. If you have non-mainstream formated videos such as DivX/XviD AVIs, VisualHub is an ideal tool for converting those to MP4.

VisualHub has become the must-have tool of choice when it comes to converting content for iTunes. Conversions can be optimized for the current selection of Apple devices. There is an option to have concerted content added automatically to iTunes where it will end up in the Movies library by default. The seamless integration with iTunes is a key differentiator from some of the lower-cost/free alternatives.

For a long time VisualHub has provided the ability to process groups of files in batches which can even be stitched together into a single combined video - I’ve found this particularly useful for many small home videos which I don’t want to edit and merge via iMovie. There is support for Xgrid Encoding, wherein if you have multiple Macs on your network with Xgrid Sharing enabled, VisualHub can distribute conversion tasks among those Macs. This is useful when converting multiple files, though be sure to let others who are using those Macs know you’re doing this before they start wondering where all their CPU cycles are disappearing to.

With the most recent release, v1.31, VisualHub adds support for AppleTV 5.1 surround sound. Videos with 5.1 AC3 audio can now be converted to play on AppleTV with the ‘Take 2′ software update from Feb 12th.

VisualHub, a Universal Binary, can be downloaded to try-out (limited to 2-minute conversions) and a full license is available for $23.32. If you want to watch your DVD collection or selection of non-MP4 videos in the living room or on the road, then VisualHub is the conversion tool for you.