Apple TV Video Converter
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Apple on February 2, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Apple’s newly released TV Video Converter is designed to convert many of the popular video formats to Apple’s TV Video MP4 format. The files can then be played on a video iPod and the forthcoming Apple TV. According to their blurb it supports multithreading and batch conversions at a >200% speed, complete with a preview window and outputs to 640 by 480 pixels.
On first look, the application seems pretty much the same as other converters such as Techspansion’s iSquint and VisualHub the former of which is freeware but until I can get my hands on the Apple TV I don’t know whether they can give the same output format. The demo is limited to 5 mins only and doesn’t appear to allow drag and drop of movies into its list of files to convert. With such a short time available, speed measurements weren’t attempted.
I tried to convert a Quicktime.mov file originally recorded from Freeview digital TV in EyeTV and exported from there. Compared with the original .mov file, the Apple TV Converter output lost a noticeable amount of colour, perhaps the result of a conversion too far. Sound and image quality were similar/the same. A smaller animated .mov file originally 31.2MB was reduced to 21.3MB with no loss in quality.
EyeTV native files did not convert. As nearly all my recordings are in that format this is a bit of a problem because it means they will all have to be converted. However, the batch conversions mean that a few overnight sessions should solve that with the added advantage of reducing the amount of disk space needed to store them. EyeTV generates large, multi-gigabyte files per hour recorded which easily shrink to hundreds of megabytes when converted to MP4.
Apple TV Converter crashed once while converting a file, probably because I was mousing around its menus. The file output was not affected. Also the preferences menu item is greyed out but a separate Tools Preference isn’t.
During conversions the maximum CPU usage was only around 50% on a G5 2×2GHz with 2.5GB Ram. This is better than with iSquint which can be a bit of a CPU hog - although Apple’s multi-tasking OSX never gets bogged down and iSquint conversions can be left as a background task even when doing heavyweight Photoshop work. Presumably Unix nerds could tweak the nice setting to get better performance.
VisualHub, iSquint’s sibling, even offers easy Xgrid support which will distribute the load among all the available Macs on a network to gave you your our own mini supercomputer. Can Vista do that? That is a genuine question.
As Apple devised Xgrid it seems a big omission especially as I had to wait for my new G5 after they were all diverted to build the Virginia Tech’s 10 teraflop Supercomputer. One last point, the Apple TV Converteron-line Help menu option takes you to a site called mp4converter.net rather than an Apple site.
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