Video Converting tools for Ipad - advice

[kaelell]

Hi all,

so I have a large amount of content which are various formats and I am searching for a tool which effortlessly will convert them for use on the Ipad.
im working on a mac, and although I already have tools to convert video, I guess what I am really after is something that will batch convert, copy to itunes and move the original to trash and do this without too much manual intervention.

So has anyone had experience with free/paid tools to do this and recommend which they have found to be the best? ( running on a mac)

thanks !

 

[poloponies]

Nothing that can do it all. I purchased the ElGato Turbo.264HD last year and really like it. It's a USB encoder (has on-board hardware that takes the burden off your processor). Aside from relatively zippy re-encoding (a 2-hour movie that would previously take 2-4 hours to encode now takes less than 1 hour) it allows for drag-and-drop in batches (and you can have the output all be in the same format or designate different formats for each).

I spent quite a bit of time ripping my always-growing DVD collection to AppleTV format last year and now have a pretty good-sized library. After I got the iPad I thought I'd try to reduce the file sizes by re-encoding to iPhone quality and dumped about 30 files onto the Turbo.264HD software, worked overnight and I had a folder full of smaller(ish) movies.

Certainly not a free solution but the time savings and ease are worth it to me.

 

[Capt T]

Have you tried Handbrake? It will convert different file types.

 

[kaelell]

thanks for the replies, elgato is a little pricey for my needs, however it is a nice device ! had not seen it before.

have used handbrake in the past but have had some problems when trying to resize, various errors led me to give up on it. If I recall the batch convert involves a few extra steps if browsing to file, selecting it, selecting settings, adding to queue. I like the idea of just drag and drop files into a batch window, select a single output setting and let it go. I have not used it in while , has anyone had good experiences with it?

 

[Bob Chadwick]

I've had problems with it crashing on two Win7 machines.