Status-Q

Converting video between different formats can be a challenging experience, particularly since it’s also rather time-consuming. You may have to wait hours to find out that what you were trying didn’t really work, and you have to start again.

Of course, there are lots of expensive high-end software packages which can do marvellous things, but there are also many utilities which can make the job easier at little or no expense.

These are some of the favourites in my toolkit, some of which will also work on non-Mac platforms:

• Perian is a free QuickTime component which will allow you to play a variety of formats in anything that uses the QuickTime engine, including, of course, the QuickTime player, but also including FrontRow. I often download things from BitTorrent for viewing on a Mac Mini connected to my TV, and this is invaluable.
• VLC (not to be confused with VNC!) The media player from the VideoLAN project will play almost any format out there, and is the thing I immediately turn to if QuickTime is defeated. But it has a lesser-known feature: it can also do conversions, and write the converted video to disc instead of playing it on the screen.
• Handbrake rips DVDs to MPEG4s. Simple and efficient.
• VisualHub brings together a bunch of conversion libraries into one, nice, simple package. Select the format you want and drop the files onto the window. The default settings are generally pretty good. You can get this functionality elsewhere for free, but the ease of use is well worth the $23.
• CocoaJT is really designed as a viewer for streamed media from around the world, but I’ve never really used it for that. For me, the important feature is that it can also record those streams to disk. If you know the URL of a stream and want a local copy, this is the app for you.
• Vixy.net. Flash Video (FLV) is becoming the dominant format on the web. ‘Tis true, ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true. One way to get those YouTube videos into another format, for example to play on a phone or iPod, is to use the online conversion service Vixy.net.
• JW FLV player. If you need to embed a Flash movie in your page but want more control than you get from things like YouTube and Google Video, you can do it yourself. Create an FLV file using VisualHub and then get hold of Jeroen Wijering’s Flash applet, which you can embed in your page and point at your FLV file. Free for personal use and very cheap for commercial.

I used a combination of the above, for example, to make my recent talks ‘Changing the Face of the PC‘ and ‘The Paper Renaissance‘ available here when they were previously only available in a streamed, Windows-only format elsewhere.

I hope others find the list useful!

I’ve uninstalled Apple’s Safari 3 beta, and gone back to version 2, at least for the time being.

The new one has some nice features, is noticeably faster, and has better JavaScript support. But it’s also definitely still a beta, and crashed a couple of times, and seemed to have one or two interesting side-effects on things like iChat.

I find it interesting that, only a few years ago, a web browser was just an accessory, where it’s now the most important app on my machine and needs to be pretty solid. But that also means I want a good, fast one, and this looked very appealing, so I’ll be upgrading again as soon as the wrinkles are ironed out.

It’s silly, I know, but I’ve started to create custom icons for the various external drives I plug into my MacBook Pro.

This is something I do rather regularly since the internal 100G drive only has about 3G spare, and I have to tidy things up frequently to keep even that much free! Most of my photos now live on a portable external drive which goes almost everywhere the laptop goes, and when I’m at home I plug in a couple of other drives as well.

Having pictorial representations of the disks in Finder windows and on the desktop makes it easier to know which ones are plugged in and turned on, and I’m much more likely to eject the right disk before unplugging it if they don’t all have the same generic icon. It’s a bit of effort to create the icons, but worth it, I think.

Here’s how to do it.

A useful shortcut I’ve just discovered…

If you have a file that wants to open with a particular app, you can right-click and use ‘Open with…’ to pick a different one. If you decide you want to make that the default behaviour, you need to go into Get Info and select the application to be used for this file in future. Not exactly tricky, but a little long-winded.

I discovered this morning that if you do an Option-right-click, the ‘Open with…’ becomes ‘Always open with…’. It sets the default and opens the file at the same time.

I always open PDFs using Preview, except for a few complex ones which require a full Acrobat Reader, because Preview is generally much faster. Occasionally, though, PDFs from other people or other apps open in Acrobat by default, and, since I normally realise this just as I’m abaout to double-click them in the Finder, it’s handy to solve the problem quickly once and for all at that point.

Sad, but not entirely unexpected: AP report that Apple have delayed the release of the next version of their OS until October.

The reason given on their web site is that they needed to divert engineering effort to the iPhone to enable it to ship on time, and that was more important than updating the Mac OS.

After the taunts about the repeated delays in Vista, this is embarrassing, but it has to be the right choice.