PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

Apple is known for products and software that “just work.” For video conversion, they have their Compressor app that gets bundled with Final Cut Pro ... Now, I’m still way back at Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD, so I don’t know if Apple have improved Compresosr much since then, but I do know that I’ve just discovered a veritable swiss army knife of video conversion: VisualHub .

I discovered it after checking out iSquint , a freeware app for converting video to iPod format. There’s a neat comparison chart between iSquint and VisualHub on the iSquint homepage. It just so happens that I’m editing some YouTube clips together ( did somebody say copyright?) at the moment and needed to convert from FLV to DV. I was a bit nervous about how I’d do it. With VisualHub, it’s as easy as drag, drop and click start. It even has a “Ready for Final Cut” check box. I don’t know what it does, but I’m happy it’s there.

If you’re doing any video conversion on a mac, this software is so worth it. It supports incoming and outgoing for iTunes, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, Mpeg4, WMV, Mpeg and Flash Video. It’s a serious tool that does one thing really, really well.