Techspansion VisualHub manual

V isualHub Users Guide By T yler Loch, Fearless Leader , T echspansion LLC Release 1.22, 2/26/07[...]

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T able of Contents Chapter 1: Crash Course  4 Chapter 2: iT unes  6 Chapter 3: PSP  8 Chapter 4: DV  11 Chapter 5: DVD  14 Chapter 6: A VI  17 Chapter 7: MP4  19 Chapter 8: WMV  21 Chapter 9: MPEG  23 Chapter 10: Flash  26 Chapter 11: Advanced  28 Chapter 12: Xgrid  30 Chapter 13: Tidbits  33 Chapter 14: T r o[...]

Chapt er 1: Cr ash Course "This readout tells you wher e you're going, this one tells you wher e you are, this one tells you where you wer e." - Dr . Emmett L. Brown 4[...]

Introduction VisualHub was created to allow people to convert video to many popular formats with ease. Most people will fi gur e it out right away with no help. If you’re someone who scof fs at the notion that an “easy to use” program needs a 44 page Users Guide, then don’t r ead past this page. Y ou won’t need to learn any more than thi[...]

Chapt er 2: iT u n e s "Y ou know , our next big step is we want it to make toast. I want to brown my bagels when I’m listening to my music. And we’re toying with r efrigeration, too." - Steve Jobs on video iPods, April 2004 6[...]

What Is It? A specialized set of MPEG-4 settings that play on modern iPods, and on the Apple TV . What Plays It? Fifth-Generation (5G) iPods. aka "iPod with Video", released in late 2005, and Apple TV , released in February 2007. More Information The 5G iPod was announced in late 2005 with video playback capabilities. Its 320x240 screen p[...]

Chapt er 3: PSP "This is the design that we came up with. There may be people that complain about its usability , but that's something which users and game software developers will have to adapt to..." - Ken Kutaragi 8[...]

What Is It? A specialized set of MPEG-4 settings that will play on the PSP . What Plays It? PSP , or PlayStation Portable, released in spring 2005. More Information The PlayStation Portable is Sony's grand entrance into the portable gaming market. It's a "jack of all trades", competing with both the GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS,[...]

A VC Encoding A VC, also known as H.264, is a newer , mor e advanced video compression type. Videos compressed with A VC will look better than its default MPEG-4 counterpart and takes up less stick space. Of course, there's a catch. It takes much longer to compress to A VC than MPEG-4. This is another personal preference. Advanced Settings The[...]

Chapt er 4: DV "...and it's indestructible! [WHAM] [WHAM] [WHAM] ...aww ...I broke some of the shielding..." - Apple Spokesperson on FireWire at MUG meeting, 1997 11[...]

What Is It? A nearly-lossless format geared towar ds non-linear video editing. What Plays It? MiniDV camcorders, iMovie, Final Cut Pr o. More Information DV video became the standard for home and pr osumer video editing with the release of iMovie in 1999. iMovie and Final Cut Pr o use it as their native editing format. Since it's a near -lossl[...]

After Conversion If you want to add your completed videos to an iMovie project, 1. Make sure iMovie is closed. 2. Locate your iMovie project fi le. Contr ol-Click on it and choose "Show Package Contents. 3. A new window will open showing you the innards of your iMovie project. Y our completed videos from VisualHub can be dropped in the "[...]

Chapt er 5: DV D "I go on Kazaa every week [...] a lot of it was pornography , some of it was music, but a lot of it was fi lms." - Jack V alenti, May 2003 "I say to you that the VCR is to the American fi lm producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." - Jack V alenti, 1982 "In the[...]

What Is It? A specialized set of MPEG-2 settings and authoring utilities that are gear ed towards cr eating discs that will play back on standalone DVD video players as well as computers. What Plays It? Standalone DVD players and most computers. More Information DVD : VHS :: CD : Vinyl (do you r emember your grade school analogies?) DVD is the wide[...]

one DVD. The fi nal result of this conversion is a disc image fi le named “VisualHubDVD.iso” that can be tested befor e being burned at your leisure on any Mac with Disk Utility , or with any PC burning software. Burn When Done Does what it says. Only available when "Author as DVD" is checked, it will burn the .iso fi le created by[...]

Chapt er 6: AV I “Please spell DivX ;-) correctly ! Capital ‘D’ lower -case ‘iv’ capital ‘X’ and do not forget the eye-blinking smiley ‘;-)’ !” -Gej 17[...]

What Is It? A legacy Windows video container resurrected by the DivX pr oject. VisualHub creates DivX-compatible MPEG-4 A VI fi les. What Plays It? Windows, Mac and Linux with appropriate codecs, VLC, DivX-certi fi ed DVD and portable players. More Information DivX video surfaced in 1998 as a hack to allow MSMPEG4v3 video in the A VI container wi[...]

Chapt er 7 : MP4 "In this world of 'my codec is better than yours' -- this codec is better ." - Frank Casanova, 2004 19[...]

What Is It? A modern container format, used with MPEG-4 and H.264 video. What Plays It? QuickTime, VLC, some portable players. More Information The MP4 container gets its heritage from the QuickTime .mov container . Its native video formats are MPEG-4 and H.264 (also known as A VC), with AAC audio. Easy Settings One-by-One 320 pixels wide By defaul[...]

Chapt er 8: WMV "I've got my kids brainwashed: Y ou don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod." - Steve Ballmer , April 2006 21[...]

What Is It? A Microsoft-cr eated video container format. What Plays It? Windows Media Player on W indows, Flip4Mac and Popwire WMV decoders on Mac, VLC, Xbox360, some portable devices. More Information The WMV format is Microsoft's video format for both local use and internet streaming. The ASF and WMV formats are nearly identical, with just t[...]

Chapt er 9: MPEG ” The basic scheme is to predict motion fr om frame to frame in the temporal direction, and then to use DCT's (discrete cosine transforms) to organize the r edundancy in the spatial directions. The DCT's ar e done on 8x8 blocks, and the motion prediction is done in the luminance (Y) channel on 16x16 blocks . In other wo[...]

What Is It? A legacy format supported by virtually all computers. What Plays It? Some standalone devices, some DVD players, every computer after 1996. More Information MPEG video was created in the early 1990s as a worldwide standar d for digital video. It lives on in many forms today . MPEG video can be played by nearly every computer without spec[...]

MPEG Pro fi les There ar e hundreds of devices that use MPEG video to some extent, all with their own speci fi c settings needs. VisualHub has presets for some of the mor e popular device formats. VCD Creates an MPEG fi le conforming to the strict VCD 1.1 speci fi cations. VCD was an MPEG-derived format popular in Asia, and playable by many DVD[...]

Chapt er 1 0: Flash "People are all the time asking me, "Mike, how do you do those stupid voices for your dumb animal characters?", and I say , "I'm Mike. Matt does the voices." - Mike Chapman 26[...]

What Is It? A Macromedia and Sor enson-created video format commonly found in Macromedia Flash .swf fi les. Used by Google Video and Y ouT ube What Plays It? Macromedia/Adobe Flash web br owser plugin for all formats, VLC. More Information Flash 6 included a video codec to go along with MP3 audio to allow simple video to be embedded in .swf fi le[...]

Chapt er 1 1: Adv anced "We knock them into little pockets with sticks. ...and we got higher numbers too!" - The T ick, on The In fi nity Ball 28[...]

W ar ning : Certain settings used in the Advanced drawer may create video files incompatible with some devices. 29 Option Explanation Crop (Left,Right,T op,Bottom) Will remove n number of pixels from a side, depending on which fi eld a number is enter ed. Crop values must be even numbers. AutoCrop By This File: Will fi nd video edges (black bars,[...]

Chapt er 1 2: Xgr id “The Xgrid Console has an intuitive Aqua interface that makes it easy to execute UNIX commands.” - Xgrid T echnology Preview PR. January 2004 30[...]

What is it and what does it do? Xgrid is Apple’ s clustering technology built into Mac OS X. Xgrid can speed up a batch conversion by dealing out a video to each available CPU on your network for conversion. When you have more than one video in the fi le list and then check the "Enable Xgrid Encoding" checkbox, VisualHub will enlist th[...]

Panther Agents: Y ou will need to download the Xgrid Agent for Panther fr om Apple’ s website: http://www .apple.com/support/downloads/xgridagentformacosx103.html Once installed, there will be a new Xgrid option in System Pr eferences. It has a similar window as shown above and should be fi lled out in the same manner . Note: VisualHub does not [...]

Chapt er 1 3: T idbits "But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much he cries or how much he begs...never , never feed him after midnight. Got it?" - Gremlins, 1984 33[...]

Video Stitching Video Stitching = Combining all the fi les in the video list into one massive fi le big enough to tell your grandkids about. Stiching is available for the iPod, DV , MP4, AVI, and MPEG formats, and is enabled by selecting the “Stitch Videos T ogether” checkbox in the main window . Important: Every fi le that is going to be st[...]

Chapt er 1 4: T roubleshooting "Son, you tried your hardest and failed miserably . The lesson is: Never try ." - Homer J. Simpson 35[...]

Hey , my video’ s out of sync. What gives? Sometimes, a video fi le will get out of sync during conversion. It’ s usually more noticeable near the end of the video. T wo possible ways to solve this: 1. Switch decoding methods. In the Advanced panel, check the “Force” box and try converting with QuickTime or ffmpeg Decoding. If your fi le [...]

Chapt er 1 5: Appendix "...But what I'd really like to do is drive a fl aming bus thr ough a wall of TVs with a stick of dynamite strapped to my head." - Pinky , Rocko’ s Moder n Life 37[...]

(vermiform appendix) 38[...]

Appendix A: Cheat Codes "The arcade version of Gradius is r eally dif fi cult, right? I never played it that much, and there was no way I could fi nish the game, so I inserted the so-called Konami code (laughs)." - Kazuhisa Hashimoto 39[...]

What in the world is a “cheat code”? How do I rescue the princess? A “cheat code” in this sense is a very advanced setting for people who want to go above and beyond the GUI. A cheat code could also be a way to use VisualHub in strange, horrible ways. Many Cheat Codes are selectable fr om the Advanced panel. All cheat codes should go in the[...]

Appendix B: Suppor t ed Codecs/F or mats “Note, the names of encoders and decoders dont always match, so there ar e several cases where the above table shows encoder only or decoder only entries even though both encoding and decoding are supported for example, the h263 decoder corr esponds to the h263 and h263p encoders, for fi le formats its ev[...]

Extra Information What follows are charts of supported video/audio codecs and container formats for import into VisualHub. Supported output formats are the selection tabs in the main interface. “Partial” means not all fi les in that format/container ar e supported - it’ s hit or miss depending on container/codec-speci fi c information. Visu[...]

Appendix C: Cr edits and Ot her Inf o 43[...]

Cr edits ffmpeg ©2006 ffmpeg Contributors. ffmpeg is a trademark of Fabrice Bellar d. http://ffmpeg.sour ceforge.net F AAC, F AAD ©2004 AudioCoding - http://www .audiocoding.com libvorbis, libogg © 1994-2006 Xiph.org - http://xiph.org liba52 http://liba52.sourceforge.net LAME http://www .mp3dev .org/ x264, libdca http://developers.videolan.or g [...]