Video Conversion on OS-X

PDD

Hi Folks,

I was wondering if people here could recommend a good tool (ideally open source) for video conversion. I got a media enclosure for a 2.5" HDD that I can hook up to the TV rather than streaming lots of stuff but unfortunately its a cheap chinese thing so it wont do a whole load of codecs so for me to use it I have to convert whatever I have to XVid or DivX in order for the media player to play it.

Ive tried using ffmpegx which has an impressive set conversion lists but it the conversion for DivX and XVid doesnt work properly. Even VLC won't play the files after conversion :-( Any suggestions

Dave

monkeyfudge

Give handbrake a try.

ZENER

+ 1 for Handbrake. You can also get DiVX for Mac at their website.

ZEN

xebec

+1 for handbrake too, I use it for a different purpose, but afaik it can be used for what you're looking for too.

PDD

Hi Folks,

Cheers for the feedback but it doesnt seem to work. Handbrake wont play nice with the MKV or MOV files that I have. :-( When I select one as a source it just says it cant read the title and grays out all the options.

Dave

babypink

visualhub is definitely worth a look

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

Breezer

babypink wrote: »

visualhub is definitely worth a look

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

Or it's free little brother, iSquint. That'll at least convert to a file that's readable by Handbrake, not sure if it can do Xvid or DivX though, never tried.

PDD

Hi Guys,

Just to give ye a quick update, I finally got FFMPEGX to work and its converting stuff nicely to MOV and MP4 :-) I think I will stick with it for the time being as VisualHub is unfortunately not free :-(

As an aside I have a new dilema, FFMPEGX is a nice GUI but I would ideally like to have a droplet (or at least I think thats what its called) for doing this where I just drop the files and they are converted to a format I choose and placed in the right directory. I came across an automator action and a scrip that claims to do this by as I dont know anyting about AppleScript or Automator I was wondering if anyone here knows how I can run these to test them and hopefully tweak them?

http://rhettmaxwell.org/automator/static.php?page=static060910-105310
http://emphaticsolutions.com/index.php/2007/07/28/drag-and-drop-apple-script-to-convert-video/
http://www.gregwalsh.com/articles/applescript_flv.htm

Dave