30 Days of AppleTV - Day 8

So…what about stuff that isn’t in iTunes?

That’s a question I faced this Sunday when it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to watch The Simpsons. Now, I could have watched it on the over the air channels that come into my home, but A) I don’t have an antenna, and B) I forgot about it until about 8:30 pm.

I don’t have a legal solution for that other than, wait for the DVDs…which will be about 10 years from now I would imagine…

So I started looking at video encoders on how to convert Divx files to AppleTV compatible video. (I mean, if I can’t watch The Simpsons, I might as well watch some of my home movies that I’ve encoded as Xvid files, right?) I tried iSquint, which I have used for converting video to iPod before, but I couldn’t get a good quality picture from the files I tried, so I started looking elsewhere.

I came across the Apple TV Video Converter and downloaded the demo. This worked perfectly, but since it was just a trial version of the software it only encoded 5 minutes of my amazingly entertaining home movies. It looks like it could be a pretty good piece of software if you’re going to be converting a lot of your own Divx files to AppleTV Compatibility. I have put in a request with the company to get a full version for review so I can give you guys some benchmarks on how long it’s going to take to convert the files into the best quality AppleTV compatible format possible. Hopefully that’ll be available soon.

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5 thoughts on “30 Days of AppleTV – Day 8”

You can buy Quicktime Pro for 30$, and then you will be able to export any video content to AppleTV in 2 clicks.

Do you want a free, quick way to convert your video library ? I did it a few days ago for free. Use MPEG streamclip

https://lucafiligheddu.blogspot.com/2007/03/video-library-ready-for-apple-tv.html

I’ve used both QT Pro and VisualHub (the commercial version of iSquint). QT is very simple and straightforward; however, it’s also rather slow. On my PowerBook G4, it typically exported at about .3x (export took three times the length of the movie).

VisualHub costs $23.32 and it’s very simple as well, though it does present more options. It achieved about .9x and allows stitching of movies. This comes in handy since some of my old rips were spread over two discs. I definitely recommend VisualHub, though on a faster machine you might go with QT if you already have the Pro version.