Michal Levy has an uncanny ability to interpret music graphically. Check out her animation, Giant Steps and her latest film, One.
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As part of our continuing discussion on media tools for the Mac, Martin Jones, MiFi.ca’s resident Über Geek, offers the following report on HandBrake-MediaFork (ed).
While there are many DVD rippers out there, for a long while HandBrake was the best of the lot for the Mac. HandBrake was more-or-less a front end for a set of command line tools that decrypted the DVD stream and then compressed it into MPEG4 or MPEG4-AVC (advanced video codec, AKA h.264) format in a single shot, ready for playback on a portable device (read iPod).
That was the good part. The bad part was the relatively ancient encoding library it was based on. This made MPEG4 encoding pretty slow and h.264 encoding unbearably slow. The settings were ambiguous, even cryptic, and it took much trial and error to get the desired results. HandBrake’s development stagnated about a year ago and it seemed like there would be no more updates forthcoming.
Then, new developers took it upon themselves to build an application heavily based on HandBrake. They called it MediaFork, and it was Good. MediaFork brought many bug fixes, and leveraged updated libraries. Encoding became reliable and fast. The interface is still ambiguous, even cryptic, but now you can tab through the video preview to see the effect of your settings on the media, and the program won’t crash. Overall, MediaFork is a welcome improvement on the work begun with HandBrake.
Last week the HandBrake developers posted that they had joined forces with the MediaFork development team and that a soon-to-be-released version of the software, the result of their combined effort, will be released as HandBrake 0.9.0.
HandBrake is dead! Long live HandBrake!
– Martin Jones
‘Back home after an absolutley wonderful trip to Costa Rica with family and friends.
On our way home we had a six hour layover in Atlanta. While Jacinthe was engrossed in her book, and Luca was busy with some rented DVDs, I was reminded what a great travel companion the iPod video can be. Time flew by as I caught up on episodes of 30 Rock, Rome, Studio 60 and the Henry Rollins Show ;-)
Recently, some friends and co-workers asked me about the best way of getting video on the iPod, especially given the Canadian version of the iTunes Store doesn’t sell TV shows or feature length films. So here are a few (Mac) applications I’ve come to depend on to get great looking video onto the iPod:
- Handbrake (freeware): Converts DVDs directly to iPod compatible MP4 video files.
- ViddyUp (US $9.95): Converts almost any video file format, such as AVI, to iPod compatible MP4 file format.
- TubeSock (US $15): Grabs video clips from YouTube and converts them to iPod compatible file formats.
- Also great for travel is MacTheRipper (freeware) which rips DVDs to your hard drive. Use it to move your movies to your laptop before a trip and leave the discs at home.
A recent podcast of the first in a series of four NAC Celebrity Speakers sessions has, as anticipated, blown away the download record for single episode of any NAC podcast. The show features arts journalist Laurie Brown in conversation with actor/writer/producer/director Paul Gross (Due South, Men with Brooms, Slings and Arrows).
I suppose there will always be a bigger audience for a good looking Mountie, than there will be for a show on tuning in fifths.