Good free Mac avi converter?

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beats me
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Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:24 pm

I'm looking for a Mac program that will convert avi movies to mpeg or other formats in bulk. I used to use isquint which worked great but I recently switched to Snow Leopard and it no longer works and the developer stopped working on isquint.

I then tried Tune4Mac but for whatever fucked up reason the video doesn't take up the full screen and about half way through the video the audio goes horribly out of sync.

Other options?

Tarekith
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by Tarekith » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:27 pm

Handbrake?

beats me
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:45 pm

I think handbrake is mainly for ripping DVDs and only does one video at a time. At least that's what I use it for.

steko
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by steko » Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:30 pm

Rahad Jackson wrote:My Awesome Mix Tape #6

beats me
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:32 pm

The queue in handbrake is kind of funky. You can't just drag and drop. you have to add each 1 at a time. Not cool if you have a bunch of files you want to convert regularly and I'm not sure how it knows what to do with each file if they are of different lengths. I like to tell handbrake what size to make the file and I don't fart around with the rest of the settings.

What I liked about isquint is I just dragged and dropped a bunch of files in of different size and length, told it to encode for TV viewing with a simple quality slider, and off it went making them all a reasonable size that looked good enough for my purposes.

I'll give Clipstream a try.

steko
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by steko » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:07 pm

I loved iSquint for its simplicity. MPEG StreamClip of course is very different (advanced) compared. Give some feedback, how it works out for you. Anyways, it's free & IMO THE swiss army knife for video stuff.
Rahad Jackson wrote:My Awesome Mix Tape #6

beats me
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:16 pm

Well it crashed after converting 1 movie in the queue and it converted that file from 578 MB to 2.6 GB. :x

Rave
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by Rave » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:56 pm

I use videomonkey

beats me
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 9:32 pm

Rave wrote:I use videomonkey
Trying now.

Salty P
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by Salty P » Mon Mar 01, 2010 10:10 pm

This is really nice little converter

http://www.ffmpegx.com/

and if you download this

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/25679

you can do batches

Peace!

steko
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by steko » Mon Mar 01, 2010 10:55 pm

beats me wrote:Well it crashed after converting 1 movie in the queue and it converted that file from 578 MB to 2.6 GB. :x
Ooops! 8O Never crashed here... (Export as MPEG-4?)
Rahad Jackson wrote:My Awesome Mix Tape #6

steko
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by steko » Mon Mar 01, 2010 11:24 pm

BTW why you want to convert the AVIs? If it's for being able to play them on your Mac & as AVI is just a container for different codecs, you could try Perian:

http://perian.org/#detail - first read: http://perian.org/#support
Rahad Jackson wrote:My Awesome Mix Tape #6

beats me
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Mon Mar 01, 2010 11:50 pm

videomonkey crashed too, but it got about 3 movies done before it did that.

I'll try Salty P's suggestion too.

I already have a translator to watch avi movies with quicktime, but last I checked avis can't be read by itunes, front row, or apple TV and that's all the options I use to watch movies.

I should have just stuck with Leopard. I really had no real reason to switch to Snow Leopard but I figured by this time most of the kinks would be ironed out. It also messed up one of my Live 7 tracks (that I'm aware of). It took a couple of the softsynths I was using and loaded the default opening preset instead of the sounds I was using. I haven't even tried 8 in it yet but I have very little hope for 8 as it is so I won't be all that disappointed if that crashes.

steko
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Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by steko » Tue Mar 02, 2010 9:56 pm

Hi beats me,

I tested it & iSquint is still working fine on 10.6. I had completely forgotten, that the max size is only 640 x 480 "optimized for TV".

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19769/isquint
Rahad Jackson wrote:My Awesome Mix Tape #6

beats me
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Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 6:39 pm

Re: Good free Mac avi converter?

Post by beats me » Tue Mar 02, 2010 10:48 pm

steko wrote:Hi beats me,

I tested it & iSquint is still working fine on 10.6. I had completely forgotten, that the max size is only 640 x 480 "optimized for TV".

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19769/isquint
hm, when I tried using it the other day it gave me an error message I couldn't translate on several attempts and when I went to the site that's when I found out they aren't developing it anymore. I'll try the version from the link above and maybe that version works and I just didn't have the most recent.

Fingers crossed.

Really the size limitation has looked just fine on my 42" flat screen and full wall projection.

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