How to convert videos for the Apple TV
- Article 49 of 89
- MacFormat, June 2007
We’re going to show you how to get virtually all your videos onto an Apple TV
Almost as soon as Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple TV, people have been finding problems with it. Chief among those has been content. It’s intended to be an entertainment hub that wirelessly links your TV with the contents of the iTunes and iPhoto libraries of up to five computers. While it has no problems with music and photos – although who’d pay £199 just to be able to have photo albums and music on their TV? – video is an issue.
For one thing, the Apple TV can’t record TV since it has no tuner card or input connections for set-top boxes. Then there’s the under-stocked UK iTunes Store, which only sells music videos and Pixar short films – you won’t be able to buy much by way of content from Apple, unlike in the US. As if that weren’t a big enough blow, the Apple TV will only play videos stored in an iPod-compatible format such as MPEG4 or H.264. Virtually no videos available online, recorded from your camcorder or from your digital camera come in these formats.
In other words, there doesn’t appear to be much TV in the Apple TV.
Fortunately, with a little ingenuity and time, you can get virtually every video you own onto your Apple TV.
iTunes already has a way to convert movies into iPod-friendly formats, so first we’re going to show you how to get a movie into iTunes and then convert it. However, iTunes is only slightly less limited than the Apple TV in terms of what movies it likes: your movie needs to be either a QuickTime movie or an MPEG4 file for iTunes to use it. Of course, QuickTime can play many more movie types than this, including various kinds of AVIs. It can also play DivX files if you install the free DivX QuickTime components (www.divx.com) or alternatives such as the open source Perian (http://perian.org/), which can also play movies such as Xvids and 3ivX.
Fortunately, if you have QuickTime Pro, it’s very easy to get iTunes to load any QuickTime-playable movie without your having to do any file conversions first, and that’s what we’ll show you next.
When all’s said and done, though, iTunes and QuickTime are both a bit slow at converting movies into iPod-compatible formats. So we’re going to show you how to use the free iSquint (www.isquint.org) to convert movies before you load them into iTunes. It’s many times faster and means you don’t have to go through all the rigmarole of installing codecs. You also get far more control over the file size and quality of the converted movies.
Lastly, we’ll show you how to get Elgato’s EyeTV software (www.elgato.com) to export movies it’s recorded into iTunes. EyeTV comes free with most Mac-compatible TV tuner devices, so if you’re already watching and recording TV on your Mac, chances are you’re using EyeTV. At the moment, you’ll need to fiddle a bit with iTunes to get information about your recordings display properly on your Apple TV, but Elgato promise some Apple TV enhancements to EyeTV later in the year that should fix this.