A year ago, indie developer shop Techspansion shut down, and the Mac lost VisualHub and iSquint, two mighty heroes of video conversion. Though they have both risen from the ashes as budding open source projects, Mac users may also be able to turn to Stomp, a full-featured video conversion and compression utility from shinywhitebox.
As the maker of iShowU, a popular screencasting tool, shinywhitebox is no stranger to working with video. Stomp features a variety of video super powers including quick-fix presets for Apple TV, YouTube, and iPod; an informative video queue for batch operations; and lots of settings for functions such as cropping and resizing. Stomp can compress or convert audio files in addition to many video formats. It even has a Photoshop-worthy list of filters and effects from Mac OS X’s Core Image library that let you adjust color, add blur and old-timey effects, or simply create a screen-saver-like video accompaniment for music you recorded and want to share on YouTube.
I haven’t put Stomp through any serious paces yet, but I especially appreciate its queue, which displays information like duration, video resolution, file size, the original video’s codec, encoding progress and ETA.
Impressively, Stomp is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, and 10.6 Snow Leopard. A demo that watermarks exported video is available for free, and a license costs just $30.
