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.]

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

We here at TUAW have expressed our love of VisualHub, Techspansion's great video encoding app, time and again. But what if those crazy folks at Techspansion decided to take the video part out of VisualHub? The resulting app would be very much like AudialHub, an audio converter that takes many UI and functionality cues from VisualHub.

Read on for our full review.

Update: I mistakenly quoted the special VisualHub cross-upgrade promotional price as the full price for AudialHub. This error has been corrected.

An upgrade to one of my favorite (and most useful) video compression and conversion utilities, VisualHub (which we've mentioned a few times), has brought with it support for 5.1 Surround Sound on the just-released Apple TV "Take 2." Despite not actually owning an Apple TV, I find myself happy for our video-converting, Apple TV-owning readers, and for the fact that any 5.1 AC3 audio I should happen to create won't be lost for that lucky audience.

The release notes also include some speed improvements for artwork tagging large (150MB+) videos not intended for the 'net, as well as a fix for aspect ratio conversion on Tivo-destined video. VisualHub 1.31 is a free upgrade for registered users. And for newcomers for whom it would be of use, it's worth every penny at the palindromic price of $23.32.

Visit the VisualHub website for more information.