Posts Tagged ‘VisualHub’

A few weeks ago Amber waxed rhapsodic about VisualHub, our go-to choice for quick and easy video conversion on the Mac. In a classic case of really unfortunate timing, between the times she began and finished her post, the software’s developer shut hit doors, effectively discontinuing the product.

All is not lost, however: The developer released his source code to the general public, meaning if you know a little bit about how to compile code on a Mac you can get VisualHub’s open source successor, FilmRedux, up and running on your Mac. It’s actually not very difficult–there’s a nice write-up on the process on WikiHow–but it does require some software for programmers that, more likely than not, isn’t on your computer. The good news is that software’s free as well–it’s just the developer tools that are included on the Mac OS installer DVD (you can also download these tools from Apple’s developers site, but it’s a pretty hefty download).

I just noticed a link to another article on the subject, with links to compiled versions of both FilmRedux and PunyVid (iSquint’s successor). It says they’re for Mac users who don’t have Leopard (OS X 10.5), but you might give them a shot as well if this whole compiling code thing is more than you want to deal with.

Thanks to thriftmac for pointing out this new development.

As a followup to Aaron’s nice introduction yesterday, I want to invite you to join in my love affair with VisualHub.  In my opinion, this software is one of the coolest things to happen to video in a long time.  Professional Developers may also find this software useful for Powerpoint presentations.

VisualHub allows you to convert many popular video formats (think .flv, .mov, Quicktime) into the specific format you need.  Sorry PC users, but as of now this is only available for Macs.  I probably use VisualHub at least once a week to convert a video from Quicktime format into a raw Flash file in order to upload it to our Learning Labs site.  You can take VisualHub for a test drive here and download a free trial version.  The website also contains very reasonable pricing options and an awesome help manual.

I’ll tell you a story about a real life situation where VisualHub came in very handy.

Once upon a time a very nice lady, we’ll call her Patty Graner, came to us with a problem.  Patty needed to insert a few video clips into her Powerpoint slides but the video we had was already in .flv (Flash) format.

So I…

1. Opened VisualHub
2. Dragged my .flv clip into the window
3. Selected MP4 (Quicktime) as my conversion choice
4. Clicked the Start button.

Check out the one-minute video below to see just how simple the whole process is.

VisualHub Demo from Stratepedia on Vimeo.

A few minutes later I had the same video in a format better suited for Powerpoint slides and Patty lived happily ever after.

The End.

*A note from Amber: Ironically, in the hour that it took me to create this post, Techspansion (the creators of VisualHub) have decided to close down their website.  Visualhub.org is still available but I’m not sure how long it will stay up.  I will post more information about the future of VisualHub as soon as possible.