What is Best Video Converter to use with Mac?

[WizardHunt]

What is the best video converter to use with mac, that will not degrade the quality much. I find some takes away from the quality alot and it makes it not good to use when I make a dvd for my family. I use Visualhub thinking it was best to use. Also another problem I am having is when I try to import a movie that is in mpeg , or avi or mov format, imovie o8 will not recognize it. I have to convert it to DV format which when I convert it with Visualhub it degrades the quality, making it not as clear. Is there a fix for this or what are your suggestions?

 

[Kankki]

Visualhub - http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/

iSquint - http://www.isquint.org/ (This is free)

EDIT:
Sorry I didn't read your post too well.

 

[bmcgonag]

What is the best video converter to use with mac, that will not degrade the quality much. I find some takes away from the quality alot and it makes it not good to use when I make a dvd for my family. I use Visualhub thinking it was best to use. Also another problem I am having is when I try to import a movie that is in mpeg , or avi or mov format, imovie o8 will not recognize it. I have to convert it to DV format which when I convert it with Visualhub it degrades the quality, making it not as clear. Is there a fix for this or what are your suggestions?

You could try MPEGStreamclip, it's a free app. As far as converting to .dv, try converting your .avi and .mov files to .mp4 using Visual hub, and set the settings to go crazy for quality, and see if you can import the .mp4 into iMovie...I know it works in 06, not sure about 08.

Best,

Brian

 

[wazgilbert]

Free video converter - Handbrake

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Details

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Screenshots of 0.9.1: Click Here

Supported sources:
Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files
PAL or NTSC
AC-3, DTS, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks

Outputs:
File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features:
Chapter selection
Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
Integrated bitrate calculator
Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
Grayscale encoding

Credits

HandBrake uses a lot of (L)GPL librairies from the Linux world:
liba52 (AC3 decoding)
libavcodec (picture cropping, scaling and deinterlacing, MPEG-4 encoding)
libdvdcss (CSS decryption)
libdvdread (DVD navigation)
libfaac (AAC encoding)
libmp3lame (MP3 encoding)
libmp4v2 (MP4 muxing)
libmpeg2 (MPEG-2 decoding)
libogg (OGM muxing)
libsamplerate (audio resampling)
libvorbis (Vorbis encoding)
libx264 (H264 encoding)
libxvidcore (MPEG-4 encoding)

Thank their authors!

 

[billmister]

Free video converter - Handbrake

I tried Handbrake to conver ac3 to either mp3 or mp4, it would not allow me to input ac3. I know this is not what the OP is asking about but, just a heads up.