Road Movie – Visualhub Alternative ?
If you have ever encoded a queue of video files you will know what an amazing time saver Visualhub can be especially if are encoding for specific platforms or hardware. The developers of Visualhub announced the demise of all their applications last October and although users are still able to use the application the search begins for a suitable alternative.
One application that appears to offer some potential is ‘Road Movie’. Road Movie is a powerful little application that offers a full range of encoding levels. It should be a considered to be solely a video encoder rather than a converter as it doesn’t support conversion between formats (eg FLV, WMV etc).
The applications is visually stunning with a really well designed GUI. The process is very easy to follow, simply click (1) to add a movie for encoding or alternatively you can drag the movie into the main work area. The area marked (2) offers the user control on how the video file is encoded, where it is stored after etc.
There are some nice features in Road Movie such as the ability to add chapters to the video, control subtitles and alter the metadata ready for iTunes and other media players. The screen shot below shows the metadata control. Road Movie also allows you to preview the movie before encoding and also enables you to remove the audio or video track.
It would be great to be able to convert an audio track from a video to mp3 but I couldn’t see that option in Road Movie although there is a WAVE preset.
Like any other video encoding application the software comes with a range of presets, ipod, AppleTV, PSP, Web etc and users can add their own presets to the list quite quickly.
As well as the ability to queue videos for encoding you also have complete control over where they go once the process is complete. As well as folder selection, iTunes, iDisk etc the application also offers direct upload to YouTube.
If you don’t want to use the YouTube service yet still want to store your video online the application offers direct upload via FTP. This would be particularly useful in a video podcasting situation.
Road Movie offers some really nice encoding options and if you own an Elgato .264 encoder (Read our review) Road Movie can take full advantage of the hardware acceleration for even speedier conversions ! In many ways Road Movie is a great alternative to the Elgato software, and a great if you want to encode video for different devices.
Unlike Visualhub it doesn’t (yet) support cross format conversion but if you are looking for an easy to use, reliable and fully featured video encoder then Road Movie would definitely with a download. If anyone has discovered a Visualhub alternative encoder that converts between formats please let us know.
Links:
Road Movie
Elgato .264
I’ll have to check out Road Movie and see what it can do. I already have Handbrake, MPEG Streamclip, etc. I just used VisualHub to make a DVD from an avi file that was said to be too big by iDVD. Somehow, VH was able to make it fit. How is it that the good ones go first…!!!
I’m still trying to figure out if I’ve wasted my money on RoadMovie.
Sadly, it doesn’t measure up to VisualHub in a number of areas. Cross-format conversion is one, but the biggest drawback is speed.
This thing is deathly slow compared to V-Hub. I dropped a queue of 30 video files this morning into it, and when I got home it had only finished 6 of them in nearly 10 hours. In the same time V-Hub would have got through probably 15-20 of them.
They need to take it apart and implement the conversion scripting that the Visualhub developer released. This app just seems to use the conversion processes built into Quicktime.
However, the Smart Meta-data is a godsend, and can save loads of time at the other end.
I don’t have a Turbo.264, so maybe that would make a difference. That being said, I don’t feel like spending more money to find out.
Anyone else had any experience of RoadMovie?