Put Your Video on the Web – Web Video Conversion Software Tools for Your Mac

We have covered a variety of conversion tools here at Cogniview but in this article I want to address a specific conversion challenge that I have had to solve recently. Namely, video for the web, using a Mac.

The Challenge

What I want to do is create videos on my mac that will play in a web page on the majority of computers, with low bandwidth requirements and at a high quality.

Should be easy, right? Should be, yeah.

Actually it is very easy, you just use viddler, YouTube, and so on, and they do the conversion and put it online for you.

My problem is I am wanting to create web video for a closed membership course, therefore these videos can not be accessible to the non-paying public, and often when you share a video using a service such as those, you give up some intellectual property and ownership.

Quicktime and iTunes

As you would probably guess, Mac software is very Apple Quicktime and iTunes centric when it comes to media and especially video. When anything multimedia pops up it is going to want to throw you to quicktime to convert and iTunes or Quicktime to play.

Using Quicktime Pro we can convert video from, say DV format from a video camera, into .MOV which some computers can play due to the relative popularity of the Quicktime plugin. Even better we can convert into an MPEG streaming format that is very well regarded. This produces a high quality video stream using H.264 encoding.

Unfortunately it is under half of computers who will have Quicktime pre-loaded. I can provide specific instructions and requirements for my course, but there is a better alternative available …

Flash

FLV and SWF videos can be played by nearly all browsers, and if they can’t they will quickly upgrade because of the ubiquity of YouTube and other hugely popular sites that use it. You get high quality, limited bandwidth use, and few technical issues.

The problem is it is more work for us as video creators, and you can’t just embed the video in your page, you need a flash video player. For the best quality you will want to find software that provides 2-pass encoding, most of the cheaper software only does one pass and therefore the output suffers.

If you have the money then the best way to create flash video is to go to the source – use Flash Pro and you know it will work and be high quality. Way overkill though if all you want to do is convert your movies.

After the official software there are many providers of flash video conversion tools. A highly regarded piece of software is Sorenson Squeeze. At $299 it is not cheap, but it does do 2-pass encoding to provide the best output.

Being the cheap scrooge that I am, I wasn’t going to pay three hundred bucks unless I absolutely had to. I ended up with a solution that I am trying and so far very happy with; DV Kitchen. At only $80, and with a free trial, it seems just the business. You can see a review here.

Converting FROM Flash

Before we get on to part 2 and actually converting our files for the web, I should mention doing things in the opposite direction, converting from the web to your computer or iPod.

Say you want to save a YouTube video to play on your TV, or get a video-based course but want to view the videos on your iPod rather than sit at your desk. Well you can, using a combination of a Firefox Plugin and a little utility intended for Sony PSP users.

Download helper allows you to download media from sites you visit. So if you like the YouTube video you are on, just click to grab it. While it says it performs conversion, I assume it is wonderful on the PC but it was no good for me and my Mac. This is where PSPWare comes in, just drag and drop to produce files that will play on your iPod or other media player!

Getting Your Video Online

In the next part I will show you how I convert my video and get it online. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools

Comments

2 Responses to “Put Your Video on the Web – Web Video Conversion Software Tools for Your Mac”

  1. Gary Bender on February 21st, 2009 1:34 am

    Here are 2 programs you may want to locate and take a longer look at. Visual Hub (an awesome does it all video related conversion program that is unfortunately no longer supported) and MPEG Streamclip which does an amazing job of conversion (and allows editing and you can even download from within the program and do the on-the-fly conversion)

  2. Chris Garrett on February 23rd, 2009 4:39 pm

    I got streamclip which is great but doesn’t seem to do FLV?

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