iSquint 1.5.2: Freeware Mac iPod Video Converter

I'm heading to a conference in a few weeks and wanted to have something to watch during the flight over. So, I purchased video webisodes of Sanctuary in HD format (no DRM) to take with me (these webisodes are produced by a subset of the team responsible for the Stargate SG-1 franchise on the Sci-Fi Channel). These webisodes look great on my MacBook. But, I'm flying coach and don't plan to pull the MacBook out and risk having the guy in the seat in front of me scrunch my screen. The idea of watching these webisodes on my iPod touch seemed like a much better idea. However, iTunes told me that the HD video files were not suitable for the touch. I don't have QuickTime Pro and didn't feel like spending the $29.99 for it. I remembered reading about iSquint a while back but had not tried it. It seemed like a good time to revisit it since the price was right: Free. So, I downloaded...

iSquint 1.5.2

...and installed it on a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac to convert the HD video files to something the iPod touch can deal with. I used the default settings for converting the HD video to work on an iPod. I checked off the option to use H.264 encoding and to send the completed video directly to iTunes and started the conversion process. It took about a minute of processing for each minute of video. As you can see from the first figure, you can choose to convert more than one video at a time. I mostly left the iMac alone during the conversion process. However, I found it quite responsive when I decided to do some web browsing and email during the conversion process.

The dialog box that pops up after the conversion completes shows an option to purchase something called Visual Hub

VisualHub is a for-fee enhanced version of iSquint that is available for US$23.32. It provides more conversion presets than iSquint (which provides a preset for iPod videos and TV videos).

The resulting video looked pretty good on my iPod touch. The video programs I converted were on the dark side to begin with. I may need to upgrade to Visual Hub to see if it has an option to brighten videos. I expected the converted non-HD iPod compatible video files to be smaller. But, I was very happily surprised to see that the 230MB to 433MB MOV files had been shrunken down to 16MB to 35MB MP4 files. That really helps since my iPod touch only has 16GB of storage.

Happy with the result of converting the HD videos, I decided to try something that might be a bit harder. I have a bunch of MPEG2 home movies files. These files were the result of taking old analog video tapes from the mid-1990s and converting them using an outboard USB analog to digital video conversion device for Microsoft Windows PCs. I took a 2GB 60 minute video and let iSquint do its job. I used the TV video setting (larger image) and increased the desired video quality. This time it took roughly 1.5 minutes of processing for each minute of video. In other words, it took roughly 90 minutes to process the 60 minutes of MPEG2 video.

I was very happy with the resulting H.264 encoded MPEG4 video. The video quality looked good to me. And, the MP4 file was a mere 561MB large compared to the original 2GB MPG file. iSquint looks like a Mac tool box keeper to me. I may still check out Visual Hub to see if it can work a bit more video conversion magic though.