Here are the specs of video that the Apple TV supports. OK. My plan? Try to copy stuff over and see what works. Not very scientific, I know. For my tests I move video into the iTunes library and hope that it plays back. This may not always be the case.
The first thing I noticed was that all the videos ended up in the Movies section of iTunes and therefore the Apple TV. It would be handy not to mix home movies with my purchased or rented films but I guess that's OK. A separate section based on your other iLife apps that output video would be cool to have.
Essentially I wanted to copy iMovie home videos of my daughter over to the device. She loves watching herself. I found that many of the videos that I'd converted to .mp4 encoding for upload to video sharing sites like Videoegg and YouTube worked straight away. They were pretty low quality however when viewed on the big screen. Some other formats like .dv did not play automatically and some .mov exports who's settings I'd tweaked also didn't play well.
So how do I convert movies for the Apple TV? I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question so I start looking around for ways to make convert my .dv or .avi files, the highest quality files I'd saved. I wanted convert them into the ideal, Apple approved format of .m4v.
I'd barely laid my hands on a Google search when immediately I'm greeted with the application called VisualHub. It's a very well regarded app with a 'sassy' interface and extremely large number of features. . For the oddly symmetrical price of $23.32 it's not a bad deal.
What else is out there? Handbrake is a great free, all in one converter of DVD video files that has a version specifically for the Apple TV .m4v file format. Unfortunately that release, 0.9.2, is only compatible with Leopard, Mac OS 10.5, which isn't an upgrade I've made at home yet.
The best converter I stumbled over, which I should have guessed was an option all along, was iTunes itself. If a video plays in iTunes I just need to right click or control-click on the file and choose convert to Apple TV. Excellent. I especially liked the fact that if the video was already in a format that the Apple TV could play, whether it was an .m4v or not, then iTunes let me know that I didn't need to convert it at all.
What if iTunes doesn't recognize the video format in the first place? Well I had an alert for one video that I needed to install a video codec listed on the Apple TV. The application I've settled on, for the time being at least, to be my one stop shop for converting content is Quicktime Pro. I bought quicktime pro for a number of small home projects and I was delighted to see that there was an export option for the Apple TV .m4v format. The export format happily had no options to choose from. No frame rates, no dimensions, nothing. Just press the button and wait. Trust in the process in other words.
The only hassle with the method that I've settled on however is the speed. On a G5 a forty minute video takes around one hour and twenty minutes to convert. On my G4 it takes so long I've never stuck with a conversion before bailing. I'm tempted to invest in this little piece of hardware and software from Elgato, the Turbo.264. It's a USB device that performs the bulk of the video conversion task and therefore takes the load of the computers CPU. The manufacturer notes that on a G4 system there are reports of a 10x speed gain. This might be well worth the $89.
I'm going to keep checking into other options as they present themselves. I'm sure that I'll keep having more videos to test with.
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