In this article I explained how to download a youtube video with safari, but it does not work for some websites, eg vimeo. There’s a neat little app here called Cosmopod that will set you back $10 but worth it if you want the easiest solution.

Cosmopod will add alittle button to safari that looks like this:

You simply click on the icon when you have a movie in your browser and it will download the video and convert it to a mpeg movie.

I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the  screen casts for Dragon Dictate.  I used a program called iShowU HD.  It costs $29 and you can get it from here. You can also use it to turn a keynote presentation into a Quicktime movie and avoid the sync problems of Keynote’s built in export movie command.

There are a number of screen capture programs for the Macintosh, some of them are free, some of  then you pay for. I   trialled out a few including Snapzpro but ended up settling on iShowU HD as my favourite. You may want to try them both out – they have a free demo period.  I like iSHowU HD because it captures from Keynote, it captures movies from Apple’s DVD player, it captures sound as well as audio, you can set it to capture the full screen or just a part of it or a window, and it’s only $29.

One way that it can be quite useful is that it can convert a keynote presentation to a QuickTime movie.  For those of you who have tried to do this from within Keynote using the ‘export movie’  command you will know that when you export a keynote presentation the timing can be different from when you play it live, so if you have lots of transitions sequenced to a soundtrack, and you try to export from keynote, it can get out of sync. A way round this is to capture the output from keynote with iShowU HD  and then save it as a QuickTime movie. (I assume you could do this with PowerPoint as well)

How to capture a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie

To capture the audio from a program such as QuickTime, you need an extra program to use with iShowU HD.  This program is called Soundflower, and here is how to use sound flower with iShowU HD  to capture the output from an application such as keynote.

1.  Download Sound flower from here and install it.

2. Select Soundflower as your main audio output  in your sound system preferences so that all  sound output from your computer will go to soundflower.

Select Soundflower as the audio output

3. By default,  iShowU  records what is coming into your computer, for example from an external microphone.   If you are recording from an application like Keynote you need to tell it that that’s what you want to do. In iShowU HD select Record audio from applications. Also  select  Monitor audio  so that you can hear  what is being recorded.

Tell iShowU HD to record audio from an application

4.  Now you can choose which screen you want to record from,  open your keynote presentation, start iShowU recording, then  start your keynote presentation. When  the keynote presentation is finished,   press escape to exit,  find your way into iShowU HD  and tell it to stop recording. You  can then open your recording in QuickTime player X  and trim the start and end to give you your video.

You don’t need soundflower if you are just capturing audio from a microphone input like I was for the Dragon Dictate videos.

It’s a two step process..

Firstly you rip the file from the DVD player and convert it to a small MP4 movie.

Then you copy the movie into itunes. Here’s how to do it step by step.

1. RIP THE MOVIE FROM THE CD:

Download a free program called handbrake from here.

Then:
1. Put in a DVD in your drive.
2. Run handbrake.
3. Select the DVD.
4. Select then the iPod preset on the right column. (You need to do this as the ipod will only recognise certain formats of movies.)
5. Press the start button.
6. Wait a few hours for it to finish!

( For more detailed instructions on handbrake see here)
There should now be a file on your desktop which is an ipod version of the movie.

2. COPY IT TO ITUNES 

1. Run itunes.
2. From the ‘File’ Menu select ‘Import’.

3. Browse to the file you created in the step above (see the picture below) and ‘Choose’.

It will now import the movie into itunes, and should copy to your ipod automatically next time you sync with your ipod.


I have a lot of .mov files. Each file is about 1 hour of movie footage but compressed to only 200-300MB. When I import them into iMovie it tries to convert them to dv files. Do you know a way to burn a collection of .mov files to a dvd so that they can be read with a normal dvd player?

Good question, let me explain a little bit about what you can and can’t do with CDs and DVDs.

You can’t put .mov files on a DVD to watch on a normal DVD player, but you can put the on a CD as a VCD to watch on a normal DVD player!

There in only one kind of DVD movie format – DVD.  But people started putting videos onto CD’s because it was cheaper, this is called VCD. When VCD format started becoming popular, companies produced DVD players that could play VDC’s.
Notice that although VCD is video on a CD,it can be played on most DVD players, but not CD players.

There are three main ways of putting video on a CD, from oldest to newest…

1. VCD 352×240. 72 minutes on a 72 minute audio CD. Very popular and will play on most DVD players.
2. SVCD: 480×576, 60 minutes of good quality SVCD on a CD. Slightly less compatible than VCD but better quality.
3. DivX. The newest video codec becoming very popular. higher compression and quality, but least compatible only new ‘DivX Certified’ DVD players play them.

Summary:

• VCD is older and worst but most compatible.
• SVCD is in the middle.
• DivX is the newest and best but least compatible.

I did a trial. I had a 600 MB DV file. I made DVD, a VCD, a SVCD and a DivX CD
Here’s the sized the turned out at:

• DVD: 76MB
• SVCD: 49MB
• VCD:30MB
• DivX:6MB

Now for the test I put them all in my 1 year old LG DVD player, they all played except the DivX one.

DivX is quite reasonable at 624×352, 1200kbps, with MP3 Audio. This is better than TV quality, not quite DVD quality, but good to watch. 45 minutes of Boston Legal takes 350Mb.

Unfortunately you can’t make a VCD on a DVD. You can only put VCD on a CD.
If you want to store a lot of video on a DVD disk you can copy it onto the DVD as data, but it won’t play on a DVD player.

Therefore you may as well go for the best – DivX. You could get over 4 hours of DivX on a DVD.

How to make a VCD….

The best free program is called burn. Download Burn from here.

It does all the converting for you. Just run it, drag and drop the quicktime movie onto it, select the format you want (VCD, SVCD, DVD or DivX) and click burn!

Well, I’m on a bit of a run here with my new samsung D900 mobile phone, the latest being what are the best settings to compress a movie to watch on my phone. The phones resolution is 320×240, which I think is similar to an ipod. I use Handbrake to encode DVD’s, you can also use these settings to export from Quicktime pro, but Handbrake is free.

FILE FORMAT: MP4
CODECS: MPEG-4/AAC Audio

VIDEO:
OUTPUT: 320×240 You may need to CROP to get the aspect ratio right, for example, 150 or so pixels off each side, depending on the original. Just play with the crop settings till the picture looks OK and not stretched.
FRAMERATE: 15 frames per seconds (fps) (Normal framerate is 25fps, but it’s hard to notice this slower framerate except for panning which is a bit staggered.)
AVERAGE VIDEO BITRATE: 200kbps (Any lower and you start to notice a decrease in quality. I tested 850, 500, 300, 250, 150 and 100kbps.)
2-pass encoding
AUDIO:
FORMAT: AAC
BITRATE: 128kbps.  (At 96 I could notice a discernable decrease in audio quality.)

I saved this under a profile called ‘phone’ and it works well. A 2 hour movie takes about 12 hours to encode, but comes out at about 500MB and is almost perfect quality on the small screen.

Due to limitations in the QuickTime Architecture, AVI video files containing MP3, WMA or AC3 audio tracks will not play directly in QuickTime based applications. You may experience stuttering, loss of sound, no sound or an error message.

We have written a useful application called “DivX Doctor II” which can fix these problems, and other issues QuickTime has with AVI files. You can download DivX Doctor II from http://doctor.3ivx.com/.
Here is the direct link to the file:

http://www.3ivx.com/codec/DivXDoctorII2.2.sit