Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: To learn what VisualHub does one can dissect the name. Visual-Hub. OK, so you still can’t guess. VisualHub is a video conversion app that can convert just about anything you would need to. It uses the reasonably fast back-end FFmpeg to convert video at a speedier pace than QuickTime Pro. It converts video in about real-time on a new Mac. You don’t have to know that an iPod with video can handle 640 by 480 resolution video at 30 frames per second to use this app. VisualHub has presets that can convert video to formats supported by ?ج£¬øtv, iPod 5G, North American and non-North American TV, PSP, Final Cut, DVD, Wii, various web formats, and a whole lot more than you’ll ever need.
In addition to all of those presets, you can change all of the usual advanced options like crop, deinterlace, resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codecs, and (you guessed it) a lot more. Very convenient and timesaving is the fact that you can save these settings as a file to make your own presets. Another timesaving aspect is preview and “video info”. Preview alone can do a lot to prevent you from using the wrong settings, saving re-encoding time. The best thing about VisualHub is it’s price. QuickTime Pro costs $29.99 at first. The problem Apple QuickTime Pro has is, besides it’s slowness, that you can lose your license with an upgrade to the next major version. Also, that license losing upgrade is essentially forced as new iTunes music and video often requires QuickTIme to be at it’s latest version. Next contenders, Roxio’s Popcorn and Crunch, $49.99 and $39.99. VisualHub’s price is $23.32. FFmpeg X is free and hard to install, and doesn’t work too well.
The only problems I have with VisualHub are with it’s interface. On the top left of the main window is a box showing “VisualHub” and more info about the app. Why? It simply wastes space on a product you paid for. Second, the “To:” label designating the sections of presets is discolored and has it’s own background. Lastly, is the reliance on ugly, separated palettes. Apps like VoodooPad at least give you the option of having them in a “drawer”. Ok, so those are small points, but they’re irritating and seem easily fixable.
Who would need VisualHub? Anyone who needs to convert video to anything other than iPod formats, iSquint and iTunes are free solutions for iPod. VisualHub looks to be the best consumer level app for converting video.

Retail Price:?Ǭ† $23.32

Site: http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Apple TV, Reviews, Software, TV, Utilities, Video & Movies, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.