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Road Movie: Finally a possible Visualhub replacement

By Joshua Schnell Sat, Feb 14, 2009 @ 6:42 AM

The day Visualhub died, I was deeply saddened.  A great indie developer was pulling the plug on an excellent product.  I’ve spent a lot of time scouring the internet for an application that could replace it.  Nothing really filled the shoes of Visualhub.  It was one of those things that your mother talked to you about as a kid–it’s hard to fill a great application’s shoes, and you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone (two for one deal on cliche).  We talked yesterday about ripping videos on our podcast and today I found an interesting alternative that boasts some pretty bold claims.  It’s called ‘Road Movie‘, and it acts a lot like Visualhub.  You drag video into it, and you convert away.  You can get it from the bitfield groups site.

It has an amazing feature set, and looks like it could be a real replacement for Visualhub, and it has a pretty sleek interface.

page10 1 Road Movie: Finally a possible Visualhub replacement

Features include:

  • Add/Edit Metadata
  • Smart Metadata by parsing the filename.
  • Add/Edit Chapters
  • Tracks Inspector
  • Batch encoding
  • Supports Elgato Turbo.264
  • Built-in encoder Presets
  • Presets for Apple TV, Cellphone, iPhone, iPod, PSP and Web and more…
  • Presets for PS3 and Nintendo Wii (NEW!!!)
  • Customize your own set of Presets
  • Upload to FTP, SFTP, .Mac, WebDav or Amazon S3
  • YouTube uploading
  • Automatically add to iTunes
  • Create and manage Destinations
  • iDisk support in one click
  • Built for 10.5 Leopard
  • Steve Gascoyne

    DON'T BE FOOLED!!!

    This is no VH replacement (which I had been desperately looking for) but what seems to be (from the stupidly slow encode times and the fact that you can find it on the Apple website) a repackaging of the hopelessly slow QT encoding engine.

    Time to encode a 5Gb MKV file to a Apple TV friendly 720p .MOV or MP4 file with VH was approx. 3hrs on my 2.4GHz Core 2 iMac.

    On RM the same film takes…… OVER 20hrs!!

    Don't waste you money like I did.

  • http://www.ronstermunch.com Aaron Abernethy

    Yeah, I've been having issues with the speed of encodes too. They really need to take this thing apart and use the code that the Visualhub developer released when he bailed.

  • http://www.ronstermunch.com Ronster

    Yeah, I've been having issues with the speed of encodes too. They really need to take this thing apart and use the code that the Visualhub developer released when he bailed.

  • James

    VisualHub uses ffmpegx to do all it's encoding. If you run visualhub then do: ps ax | grep visualhub you can see the exact commands he uses for different presets. :)

  • Tim

    The fact that the developer of visualhub just left everyone hanging without turning over the code is just kind of dumb. I tried to buy it. I WOULD BE GLAD TO BUY IT, in whatever state it’s in, with no expectations of support !!! Why didn’t he just allow free downloads to let it live on??? And get publicity as well? Just bad business. He’s funny and all, and it’s his right to take the dog out and shoot it instead of letting someone give it a home.

    So instead I downlaoded version 1.34 from rapidshard and used this serial number:

    Network Administrator
    netadmin@ionagroup.com
    VHUB-GGCTF3-AMPLK-N3YWA-AFQRH-WDW7Y

    It works.

    The thing is, I would never do this un any other circumstance. But this is an unusual thing. Long live Visual Hub!!!

    Tim

    • http://www.macgasm.net Joshua Schnell

      Tim, he released it to the open source community, and it is being turned into a free alternative.

    • Tim

      I misspoke. I was aware that he turned over the code. What I meant was that he should turn over the last version of the application. Or just reduce the price with no promise of service.

      Heck. I would gladly pay $9.99 for this “over the hill” app. And guess what…I bet there are AT LEAST 1,000 or more people who would do the same.

      Do that math…that’s a good deal for both sides.

      Course, I there very well may be legal implications for doing that, that I am not aware of…

      blah, blah, blah. I’m tired of talking.

  • Tim

    Right…but I looked high and low and simply couldn’t find a compiled version for OS X (unless I’m missing something…). I’m not a developer. I would love to buy a tool like Visualhub if it existed, but it don’t.

    I checked out Road Movie and it’s cool & all, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Visualhub for the things I need (convert mov, avi, mp4, etc. to .flv and adjust aspect ratio, etc.)

    Seriously, I will buy it, or donate (open source) as soon as I can can get my hands on a compiled app.

    In the mean time, I resort to being an appreciative pirate…

  • http://www.oberdorf.org/ Oliver

    What you’re looking for already exists; it’s called Video Monkey

    http://videomonkey.org/Video_Monkey/About.html

    That said, I use and love RoadMovie – just use it with an elGato x264.turbo and the encoding speeds are fine. VideoMonkey is also great, though – in some ways I like it better than VisualHub.

    • Tim

      Sorry Oliver. I couldn’t disagree more. Just because video monkey is based on the same code doesn’t make it visualhub. It has 1/3 the feature set of visual hub.

  • Loren Helgeson

    I’m gonna have to try this. I still use VisualHub to this day – amazing little package. But I would like something that runs on more recently updated codecs for audio and video.