If you’ve spent any quality time converting video for your iPod, AppleTV, or iPhone, you’ve likely encountered Techspansion’s amazing converter utility, VisualHub. You’re also likely aware that Techspansion has shuttered its doors and no longer offers VisualHub and its other conversion products, AudialHub and iSquint.
Sort of.
And that “sort of” is welcome news to anyone who didn’t purchase a copy of VisualHub. Yes, that fine utility is on its way to being reborn as the open-source FilmRedux (and iSquint as the just-as-open-source PunyVid).
Before uncorking the champagne and flinging the confetti, note that FilmRedux is still in a shaky state. PunyVid, however, works reasonably well.
Currently, the project is being headed by a three person team and has been put together in AppleScript Studio. The plan is to port it to Cocoa/Objective C, which the developers believe won’t be a difficult task as much of the work is being handled by FFmpeg, an open-source encoder/converter.
In order for FilmRedux to work (or work as best as it currently can) you’ll need to install Growl on your Intel Mac running Leopard. You should also install a copy of libfaac. And, of course, you need a copy of the applications, packaged as Transcoder Redux.
Once you install all these things, there’s a chance it will actually work (and if FilmRedux doesn’t, give PunyVid a try—it’s included in the Transcoder Redux bundle). And if neither work, have some patience. This looks like a going concern and one that will be huge boon to the Mac community.