Filed under: Software, Video, Open Source
First Look: Video Monkey swings in to save the day
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.
Continue reading “First Look: Video Monkey swings in to save the day”

An upgrade to one of my favorite (and most useful) video compression and conversion utilities,
Roxio has released version 3 of their DVD and video conversion utility 
When your
I just have to come right out and say it:
This week in 
In many of the recent reviews of the Apple TV, the Xbox 360 was often mentioned as a competing Media Extender product. Having recently bought a 360, I thought it would be good to discover the ways in which my two pretty white boxes can work together. In this TUAW Guide to Xbox 360 and the Mac, I'm going to discuss some of both the hardware and software compatibilities between the machines. If you've ever been curious about the Xbox 360 read on, and if you're an old hand my Gamertag is matonmacs, send a friend request my way; maybe we can get a TUAW clan going!


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