[tweetmeme]Collecting and watching video is one task every personal Mac is put to use for. While QuickTime or VLC can play pretty much any kind of file you throw at it, it’s a lot better to get video to reside in your iTunes library. iTunes is the the most fussy video manager, mostly because Apple wants you to buy content from their store, but it’s also your one way ticket to watching video on your iPhone, iPod, iPad, or AppleTV. So you have to learn to deal with it.

Here’s a little guide, on using some of the video converters on the Mac, that will make sure the process is as smooth as can be.

Handbrake

A free and open source video encoder, Handbrake was originally designed to handle DVD ripping, but later got the ability to convert ‘regular’ videos like AVIs and MKVs. The only problem with Handbrake though, is that it’s far from what a Mac app should look like—did I mention it’s open source?

Handbrake looks daunting on launch. It’s got all kinds of controls sprawled over its user interface, tabs that switch between modes, and you’re always left wondering whether or not you’re supposed to change something. The good news: for a straightforward conversion, all you need to press is Start. Once you’ve selected your video for conversion (click “Source” if you haven’t), just make sure your output directory is of your choosing (it defaults to Desktop), and hit Start. It will create an H264 compressed video file that will play on your iPhone, iPod touch, and possibly even on the AppleTV. But those controls and tabs are there for a reason.

The Toggle presets fly-out drawer allows you to select from different presets. I’ve found the High Profile produces great results with acceptable file size and speed of conversion. You can quickly check the picture quality of the output using the preview window, useful if you’ve changed a bunch of advanced settings.

Since Handbrake was designed to handle one DVD at a time, it’s not optimal for handling multiple video files like an entire TV show series at once time. It does have a queue, but you have to manually add files, one at a time. Moreover, there’s almost no meta-data support, so you’ll have to tag them later when you add them to iTunes. Of course, there’s solutions for that, so read on.

Ideal for: DVD ripping and occasional video conversions, or precise transcoding. Best used in conjunction with MetaX.

Ripit

If you’ve got a massive DVD collection, and oodles of storage space, Ripit might just appeal to you. Unlike Handbrake, it’s a one click solution. You don’t have any options other than naming your output. This allows the user interface to be something out of this world—spinning starburst n all. The suck? It copies your entire DVD, as is, without any re-encoding, lossless. That means you have to have around 7GB of hard drive space for every movie you want to store on your hard drive. But then again, it does it in the best way possible. It’s fast, uses the DiscID to get the name of the movie, and is able to copy almost every disc in the market (the team has thousands of unique discs for compatibility).

I only wish they would build in an encoder (they promised but never delivered) that would at least reduce the file size to at least around 25% of the original. That way the quality stays intact, but you’re saving a huge amount of space.

Ripit is best used if you’re real lazy about your conversions, or if you have oodles of hard drive space you don’t know what to do with, and is best used with Multiplex, the fancy swirly DVD media center app.

Ideal for: DVD collectors with oodles of hard drive space, wanting to keep lossless copies of their precious DVDs. Super easy to use. $20.

RoadMovie

If you’re looking for an elegant solution to convert video, RoadMovie has some really neat features. I’ve reviewed it in the past, and I’ll continue to recommend it. RoadMovie starts off with a clean UI. Nothing’s there that doesn’t need to be there, yet it has quite a bit of power should you need it.

RoadMovie uses the QuickTime engine to encode content, so it supports any of the formats that QuickTime can play. It’s got easy presets for exporting for iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, and others; and allows you to feed your media with the right metadata, so your iTunes collection looks spick and span. Since it uses the QuickTime engine, it’s a little slower than what Handbrake can achieve with FFmpeg, but it should fly if an Elgato Turbo.264 hardware encoder is plugged in.

Ideal for: Those looking for an easy to use solution to watch movies on their iPhones and AppleTVs. Lots of features, including creation of chapters, subtitles, minimal metadata support. $25.

iFlicks

This video converter not only encodes video, but pays great attention to the metadata that goes along with it. iFlicks is decent to look at, and you get a bunch of presets for optimising video for iPhone and others. It also uses the QuickTime engine, so you can fine tune your conversions, as well as use the Turbo.264 hardware encoder to speed up the process. The one feature that most interests me, is the ability to save merely a flattened .mov file or even a reference file. This will rewrap any video that QuickTime can play into the .mov format which iTunes understands, without any re-encoding. The process for flattening a movie is the same time required to write that amount of data. And to create a reference file is seconds for each file. These files won’t play on the iPhone or AppleTV, but will have all the meta-data working—great if you’re using your Mac as a media center device.

What’s different about iFlicks, is that it ties into themoviedb.org and tvdb.org to grab metadata for files. And it’s really good at doing so. Most movies and TV shows will recognise without you having to do anything at all. Many a times you have to manually search and select the correct title, but once you’ve done that it pulls cast and crew info, artwork, so when you see it in Front Row it looks as complete as can be.

iFlicks also allows you to tag and convert video already residing in iTunes. It installs itself into the iTunes script menu, from where you can directly add metadata to video files, or convert it for AppleTV or iPhone. Everything is done almost automatically with little minimal twiddling.

Ideal for: Complete solution for converting and tagging movies for iTunes, including comprehensive meta data support, reverse tagging from iTunes, as well as quick flattening of movies. A little slow due to QT engine, but can be sped up with the Turbo.264 hardware encoder. €20 (~$27).

VideoMonkey

When VisualHub died—rather, was killed—TechSpansion released its source. From that rose FilmRedux, an open source project based on the VisualHub source. That never did take off as promised (not sure what happened there), but another developer did make something of that code, and so we have VideoMonkey.

VideoMonkey is based off FilmRedux, but it’s definitely growing into something unique. First of all, you get the awesome fast ffmpeg engine in an easy to use interface that VisualHub was known for. The quality slider is testament to its fun loving UI. VideoMonkey also adds metadata support, tying into tvdb.org and themoviedb.org, both community driven databases. I don’t think it can use the Turbo.264 hardware encoder, but ffmpeg is mighty faster than QuickTime, so you should be just fine. VideoMonkey is free and open source as well, so go nuts!

Ideal for: Easy to use, fast ffmpeg engine, and includes metadata support (a little flaky at times), and free.

MetaX

But, there’s more. While the others try to do everything, MetaX lives and breathes on getting metadata into your iTunes library. So naturally it’s kind of a perfectionist. MetaX has got all the features you’d need, including presets, poster grabbing, barcode scanning, and even includes 64-bit tagging. What sets MetaX apart, is its ability to find even the most unknown of movies and TV shows using its TagChimp database. This database allows you to grab metadata shared by its users, as well as submit data for those shows that aren’t already present or have wrong tags.

The downside is that MetaX only works with iTunes compatible files (including any flattened movs); there’s no scope for any kind of conversion. Moreover, it doesn’t plug into iTunes, so you have to rework your collection on your own. It’s free though, and if you already have a lot of converted data, MetaX will help you quickly tag those into respectable files. I should note that while MetaX has worked flawlessly for me in the past, this time round it couldn’t pull any data for any video file; hence I didn’t grab a screenshot. I’ll just consider it a bug on my system.

Ideal for: Those who already have a bunch of videos converted (maybe with Handbrake) and want to get them into iTunes properly tagged. Free.

To conclude

To conclude, I’m confused. I’ve yet to decide what I’d use on a regular basis. And this has been going on for months now. Sometimes I prefer VideoMonkey (for those quick operations), Handbrake (DVDs, etc), or iFlicks with its stellar integration with iTunes (but slower QT encoder). Which is why I’ve added the “Ideal for” runner at the bottom of every section. Of course, if you’re not interested in getting media into your iPhone, you can always use Plex or Boxee which will sort things out behind the scenes.

Did I leave out something crucial?

[Header img via Far0_RC1]