iSquint maker Techspansion has released VisualHub, which it bills as a “universal video converter” for the Mac. The software requires Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later and cost $23.32 to register.
Based on iSquint — an iPod video conversion utility — VisualHub puts a friendly face on the oft-daunting task of transcoding video to different formats. It supports video iPods and Sony PlayStation Portables (PSPs), DV, DVD, AVI, MPEG-4, WMV, MPEG and Flash Video. It’s a Universal Binary that runs natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macs.
You simply drag and drop the video you wish to convert, tell VisualHub what format you’d like to make the video ready for, highlight some options (an advanced window gives you much finer control) and then click on the Start button to get things rolling.
VisualHub even supports distributed computing: VisualHub supports Xgrid, Apple’s grid computing software, which enables VisualHub to distribute the task of converting the video out to several networked Macintoshes.
Other features include batch processing, a dynamic preview window, the ability to “stitch” multiple files together and more.
A downloadable demo that encodes for two minutes of video is available. Paying the registration fee removes the encoding time limit.