compression posts

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Reviews, Retro Mac

TUAW Review: StuffIt Deluxe 2010

by Steven Sande (RSS feed) on Oct 3rd, 2009

If there's one Mac application that has seemingly been around forever, it's StuffIt. This compression and archiving utility was the tool to use for compressing files years ago, and I'll still occasionally run into a .sit file extension when pulling up old files. The original application was the source of a bit of Mac folklore, as it was developed and supported for quite a while by a young student by the name of Raymond Lau.

Mac OS X did its best to kill off StuffIt by adding built-in support for Zip compression, but the utility has continued to flourish over the years. During the last week, Smith Micro released the newest version of the application, StuffIt Deluxe 2010 (US$79.95, with an introductory price of US$29.95 through October 15, 2009).

Since compression has been part of Mac OS X for quite a while, you might think that this application would have limited usefulness. Smith Micro is spinning StuffIt Deluxe 2010 as a better way to share large files over the Internet. How does it work? Read on, my friends...

Continue reading “TUAW Review: StuffIt Deluxe 2010”

Tags: compression, fail, i hate this app, IHateThisApp, mac, review, software, stuffit, utility, vintage

Filed under: Accessories, Video

Turbo.264 HD adds AVCHD transcoding savvy

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Mar 20th, 2009

When first we met the Turbo.264 hardware compression accelerator, it did a great job of speeding up video exports on older CPUs but didn't offer a tremendous boost on modern Intel hardware. True, it worked well with Elgato's EyeTV software to transcode TV recordings overnight for iPod or iPhone use, but not everyone needed to spend the money to recover that time.

Elgato's got an upgrade to the Turbo hardware now, the Turbo.264 HD. On the one hand, the new unit is limited to Intel Mac owners running Leopard -- leaving out the G4 and G5 users who benefited most from the speed boost of the older unit.

On the other hand, the widget has the ability to export in HD resolutions; you can do basic trim edits on clips and handle almost any input format under the sun. More importantly, the new stick brings a vital feature to HD camcorder users: on-the-fly transcoding of AVCHD video.

Mac users who have AVCHD camcorders have suffered long and loudly with the format, even though native editors like NeoScene and batch converters like VoltaicHD have simplified things a bit. While iMovie '09 and Final Cut/FCE can handle AVCHD, importing is a slow slog. The Turbo.264 HD promises to dramatically reduce importation time for AVCHD clips and offload the work of transcoding them from the computer's processor. If it works as advertised, it's going to be very popular with HD camcorder users.

The new unit is $150US and shipping now.

Tags: avchd, compression, elgato, h.264, intel, leopard, turbo 264, turbo.264, Turbo264, USB, video

Filed under: Software, Video, Open Source

First Look: Video Monkey swings in to save the day

by Aron Trimble (RSS feed) on Mar 16th, 2009

When Techspansion closed its doors in October of last year, there were hordes of individuals clamoring for a slice of easy video-conversion pie to fill the void in their now-empty hearts. Many did not find consolation in the fact that Handbrake supported universal input within a scant two months.

An application that offers every configuration option available is all well and good for many fine folks; but there are some of us that want this type of thing to be simple. What I and others desired so greatly was a video-conversion app for the rest of us -- and that application was VisualHub.

Enter Video Monkey. Following the release of Tyler's source code for VisualHub as the TranscoderRedux project, one lone soul, named Chris, decided to brave the trepid waters and save all of us from drowning in a sea of videos awaiting conversion for our iPhones and AppleTVs.

Chris makes it perfectly clear that Video Monkey's mission is inspired by, and borrowed from, Visual Hub. However, while Visual Hub relied heavily on AppleScript, Video Monkey is written exclusively in Cocoa. After Chris got in touch with TUAW, I got right to work checking out this holy grail of simple video-conversion applications. Read on for my first impressions and initial thoughts or just check out the gallery.

Gallery: Video Monkey: dead-simple video conversion

Continue reading “First Look: Video Monkey swings in to save the day”

Tags: compression, video, video monkey, VideoMonkey, visualhub

Filed under: Software

Techspansion closes, VisualHub discontinued

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Oct 3rd, 2008

There are plenty of Mac tools for video compression in the marketplace, ranging from Windows Media-oriented tools (Flip4Mac) to professional workflow builders (Sorenson Squeeze) to hardware-assisted H.264 crunchers (Elgato turbo.264). Few of these products, however, have hit the sweet spot of wide-ranging capability, quality output and extremely affordable pricing like VisualHub from Techspansion. For less than $25, you got Flash and WMV output that rivaled products 3x the price, plus easy conversion to iPod and iPhone-friendly formats. Along with sister apps audio compressor AudialHub and iPod-only video converter iSquint, VisualHub was a prime example of a well-built, "Mac way" media app.

Sadly, the past tense above is no accident. Techspansion's website has been shuttered and the products have been discontinued. Tyler Loch (Techspansion's founder) let us know that the difficult decision to close down Techspansion is a personal one, and he's readjusting his priorities to focus on other needs. His choice is understandable, but we will definitely miss VisualHub (not to mention the laugh-out-loud funniest release notes in software history). Best of luck to Tyler in his future efforts.

Update: For those who are inquiring, there are no current plans to move VisualHub to open source. The underlying engine for much of the compression magic, ffmpeg, is already open-source and present in other Mac tools such as Handbrake.

Thanks Brandon

Tags: breakingnews, compression, techspansion, video, visualhub

Filed under: Software, How-tos, Odds and ends, Developer

The latest on Acorn

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Sep 19th, 2007

Just about a week after its release, Acorn (Gus Mueller's sparkling little image editor) is looking a 1.0.1 release dead in the face. Mueller hasn't updated it officially yet, but he has released development builds of both VoodooPad and Acorn over on his site.

The newest Acorn release will include a JPEG compression/quality slider when saving, as well as a number of bug fixes (everyone loves those, right?). If you want to try it out now, you can hit the dev build, but the rest of us will be happy waiting for an official release I'm sure.

Mueller has also created a wiki just for Acorn, and it's got a few nice tips and tricks, a plugin section, and a writeup on the Acorn file format. It's pretty barebones at the moment. but hey, it's a wiki, and it just started. Give it some time (or some contributions of your own), and it'll likely soon be an invaluable guide to all the Acorn users out there.

Tags: acorn, compression, developmentbuilds, gusmueller, jpeg, voodoopad, wiki

Filed under: Software, Video

Free DivX Pro license if you act quickly

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Jun 7th, 2007

The fine folks over at Macenstein spotted this special deal: a free license for the Mac version of DivX Pro, if you send in your email address today -- a $20 value. I can't see the end-of-offer indication on the site, but I'll take their word for it.

With the Pro version you get the free player (naturally), plus DivX Converter for batch encoding and the DivX Pro codec for export from QuickTime Pro-aware applications. Based on the theory that you can never be too rich, too thin or have too many video compression applications, it's worth checking out.

Thanks Jonathan & Nik!

Tags: compression, divx, free, video

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple TV

AP disses Apple TV

by Erica Sadun (RSS feed) on Apr 5th, 2007

Peter Svensson of the Associated Press likes the look of Apple TV as a gadget but declared that its video output came up short. "It's as if Apple had introduced an iPod that sounded like a cassette player," he writes. Svensson downloaded a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean from iTunes and declared it "barely watchable".

The article is a bit hazy about testing details, but I'm pretty sure Svensson neither tried watching any High Def content on Apple TV nor did he compare the same data files on both units. Should he blame Apple TV hardware when iTunes compression might have been at fault for his viewing experience? Perhaps a little. Given the tight bond between Apple TV and iTunes, Apple does have to stand behind its current library of video data.

Tags: Apple TV, AppleTv, Compression, Quality, Video

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Freeware

Batch process your images with SmallImage

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Apr 3rd, 2006

SmallImage is a nice piece of freeware for anyone who works with a lot of photos all day long. Just drop a folder full of images into SmallImage's main window, and you can remove your photos' embedded profiles, resize them, create thumbnails and then re-compress them with one click. As you can see from the screen shot to the right, SmallImage also provides a great deal of information on each image, like size, camera information, compression and metadata information. You can even remove or create your own preview icon for any image.

SmallImage requires Mac OS 10.3.9 and is free.

[Via FreeMacWare]

Tags: compression, downloadsquad, metdata, photo processing, PhotoProcessing, smallimage, thumbnails

Filed under: iPod Family, Video, Tips and tricks

Good compression settings for iPod videos

by C.K. Sample, III (RSS feed) on Dec 21st, 2005

I've been tinkering with compression settings on videos, trying to find the best balance of size, quality, compression settings and compatibility for my video-capable iPod ever since the beginning of November. H.264 is very nice and cool, but it takes forever and a day to compress using QuickTime Pro's export to iPod option. Since I'm not really interested in projecting my videos in large on the wall via an HD-capable projector, there's no need to pick it over MPEG-4. Also, I want to make sure that my videos, especially ones like the video podcasts we do here at TUAW, are viewable by as many people as possible. So the best option is to wrap it in a .mov wrapper. That way, anyone with QuickTime should be able to watch the file.

So, in order to do this nicely, I first installed 3ivx as the codec to use. I've been meaning to try the new Divx codec, but haven't had a chance yet. I open the file I want to convert in QuickTime Pro and choose Export to Movie and hit the Options button. This will bring up a Movie Settings panel like the one pictured with this post:

Choose Settings... and pick the 3ivx D4 4.5.1 codec, set the quality to medium, the frame rate to 24 and bitrate to 400 kbits/sec.
Then adjust the size. If you have a 740x480 video file, then shrink it down to 360x240.
Set the sound to AAC 44.100 kHz Stereo at 160kbps.
If you are hosting the file online, check the Prepare for Internet Streaming box and select Fast Start.

That's it. The resulting file will be reasonably sized and playable in a browser, on your iPod or on any QuickTime compatible system.

Tags: compression, ipod, settings, tip, video

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