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Mac App of the Week: MPlayerX offers multi-format playback for OS X
MPlayerX (free) is one of those fabulous utilities like VLC, NicePlayer and MPEG Streamclip that seems to have ended up on my Mac as a must-have playback app. It offers an OS X wrapper around FFmpeg and MPlayer libraries. These enable it to handle a wide range of media codecs without requiring you to install extra packages. The player provides tons of options aimed at the power user. I must be honest, though, and say that 99.999 percent of the time, I play a file, watch it and that's that. If you want more features, the app lets you tweak playback speeds, video aspects, create loops and more. Say, for example, you are watching an out-of sync video, whose audio needs a tiny delay tweak. MPlayerX makes it simple to apply that audio delay directly in the playback window. MPlayerX is tremendously hacker friendly. According to the developer, it integrates with third-party remote functions, offers audio pass-through for home theater compatibility and even supports YouTube video streaming. If you wish to contribute to the MPlayerX project, there's a donate button on the site's main page.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Apple TV and oddball video formats
Hey Auntie TUAW, I just ordered my new Apple TV, and have a ton of footage in MKV, AVI, etc. which probably won't work with iTunes, let alone my Apple TV. What can I do to batch convert and import all my movies to iTunes, which will work with Apple TV and be as high-rez as possible? With all my love, Ari
Evom beta takes up iSquint's mantle, effortlessly converts video formats
While still in beta, Evom (from The Little App Factory, makers of iPodRip) looks ready to pick up where iSquint left off. It easily and quickly converts videos to formats compatible with iTunes, YouTube, your iPod, and Apple TV. It couldn't be a simpler drag-and-drop operation: drop the video on the Evom window, and select a destination. After that, Evom does the heavy lifting and (optionally) adds the finished video to iTunes. The output quality is good -- it uses the same technical foundation as ffmpegX. You get the same high quality without all the fiddly controls of ffmpegX. Evom also includes a bookmarklet that lets you save off YouTube videos to your computer with a single click. The quality of the output there mostly depends on how good the source video is, but it couldn't be easier. iSquint, my favorite "as if by magic" video conversion tool, was discontinued after Techspansion (also the makers of iSquint's bigger brother VisualHub) shut their doors last October. The VisualHub codebase is still being developed, however, in a new project called Video Monkey that Aron covered in March, which is also well worth a look. Evom is in beta, but unlike iSquint, it appears like it may cost something when the final version is released. It also appears limited to converting 60 items until it's registered, and trying to register the app leads to a non-existent shopping cart area. Even so, the simple interface and easy installation will be worth a few bucks to me. [Via Daring Fireball.]
Convert movies and undercook eggs on the iPhone
The bad news is that the iPhone really does not run hot enough to cook an egg. Uncomfortably warm? Yes. Safe egg-cooking warm? No. The good news is that you can use an iPhone port of ffmpeg to convert videos from DivX and XVid to mp4. iPhone hacker "core"'s latest version of ffmpeg will convert a wide range of video formats to iPhone-compatible formats. If you decide to do this, be aware that it will take forever and run hot, and we still don't know how to change the clock rate to make it go faster. Make sure your iPhone is well ventilated and plugged into a power-source for the duration. Also run your conversion with nohup so that when the iPhone goes to sleep (because you know it will) it won't kill your conversion process like it did with mine. So is there a point to converting videos on the relatively underpowered iPhone? Well, no, really there isn't. Sometimes it's just enough to know that you can. Here's an example of the syntax: ffmpeg -i AVI_DivX.avi -f mp4 test.mp4
XBMC on OS X releases version .1
Those following the XBMC (a.k.a. Xbox Media Center, although they'll probably need a name change soon, considering all the platforms they've jumped off to) development for the Mac have some good news coming to them: the release has reached version .1.It's still as shaky as these things come, but new to this version are fullscreen support, "bleeding edge" ffmpeg libraries, and a regular FPS in video playback. It's still not anything the average user should be running, but as I said, for those interested in following along with the development, it should be welcome news.The download is available from the wiki, and we're told it's now super simple to install (though actually running stably may be a little tougher) -- just drag into your Applications folder and cross your fingers. Thanks, Yuval!Update: They got that name change: here's the new site.
