Review: Roxio Crunch

• Article 51 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2007

Roxio’s Crunch is another program designed to fill a gap in the market that Apple has left wide open for no really well explored reason. In essence, the problem is that the Apple TV and the video iPod will only play movies encoded in a couple of formats; if you want your video to play on one of those devices, you need to encode it and then load it into iTunes, or vice versa.

Crunch deploys Roxio’s familiar Toast interface to leap to the rescue of those more or less abandoned by Apple. Drag and drop onto the Crunch window any file that’s QuickTime-compatible or in one of the other formats, such as DivX and MPEG2, that Crunch supports. Then click the ‘Burn’ button, choose whether to save at iPhone or iPod resolution or the higher resolutions required by the Apple TV, and how you want your file encoded: quickly; slowly but with a higher picture quality; or to your own custom settings. Crunch will then convert the movie file into the required format and leave it in a destination of your choice. By default, this a specially created “Crunch” playlist in iTunes, but you can pick other folders such as the Desktop or your Movies directory. As you might expect if you’re familiar with Toast, there’s also a graphic preview by the burn button that gives you an idea of final file size with the current settings.

The powers of Toast and Roxio’s other program, Popcorn, are also on display in the ability of Crunch to convert unencoded DVDs into iPod, iPhone and Apple TV-friendly files. You can provide it with a DVD, an image of a DVD or a VIDEO_TS folder and Crunch will let you pick the movie and/or extras you want to extract and convert. As a feature, it’s a bit useless for most people unless you happen to have something to decrypt region-encoded disks and £18 for a multi-region Alba DVD player from Sainsbury’s is cheaper than Crunch and will let you play all your DVDs on your TV without any time-consuming conversions or resolution drop-off. But if you’re looking to have region-free DVD content on your iPod or your iPhone when you get it, we’re sure it’ll come in very handy.

The trouble with Crunch is that despite being very easy to use, there are better, cheaper alternatives on the market already. The free Handbrake provides fast and high-resolution conversions of movie files and DVDs to iPod and Apple TV formats, as well as PSP formats, but admittedly is harder to use than Crunch. The equally free iSquint is about as easy to use as Crunch, and can convert movie files to iPod resolution although it’s less polished than Crunch. iSquint’s more expensive brother VisualHub (still just $23) is as easy to use and can also convert to Apple TV resolution, as well as other formats such as PSP, Flash movie, DV and DVD.

Another drawback is that Crunch relies on QuickTime for most of its conversion work, which makes it slow. On our test machine, we compared compression times of Crunch against VisualHub. Using the “Apple TV – Fastest” setting in Crunch to compress a 350MB DivX movie took 38 minutes to produce a 640x360 resolution file; using VisualHub’s highest quality “Apple TV” setting took just 15 minutes to produce a 624x352 resolution file, although the picture quality was visibly poorer than Crunch’s output. Switching to “Apple TV – Best” with Crunch took an astonishing 1h47 minutes to produce a file of the same resolution, despite the Apple TV being capable of displaying 720-width videos; turning on H.264 encoding in VisualHub to match Crunch still took that program only 40 minutes. Suprisingly, Crunch’s ‘highest quality’ conversion was the worst of the lot.

At the moment, Crunch offers very little that free or cheaper programs don’t provide. Better iTunes integration so that you could pre-fill metadata from IMDB or other sources, specify video type, or pick different playlists would have helped lift it out the ordinary. So would a speed advantage, Automator actions, a watch folder, XGrid integration like VisualHub’s to distribute calculations among multiple Macs or indeed anything that other programs don’t already offer at a lower price. Wait for version two.