Roxio App Brings Home Video to Apple TV
Roxio has a new software add-on tool called Crunch that will allow you to watch your wacky home videos, captured video and iMovie creations on the living room TV using Apple TV. Today, Apple TV ports only iTunes video to the TV set.
We got the good news at a subdued little corporate event the company held at the House of Shields in downtown San Francisco Tuesday. My compliments to Roxio on the venue.
The Mac version of Crunch comes out May 8 and the PC version will appear within three months, Roxio spokesman Chris Taylor says. The new app will cost $49.95.
Crunch converts the bit rates and dimensions of your video files so that they look right on Apple TV. It does the same thing for video being ported to video iPods, and soon iPhones. The software supports all video file types supported by QuickTime, plus MPEG2 and DivX.
Crunch does nothing with the ownership rights of video files, and cannot port any file wrapped with DRM.
After a video file is dragged into the Crunch app, a dialog box (shown below) pops up asking a)which device to port the video to, b) the quality of the compression to be used, and c) the storage destination of the formatted file.
Once the "OK" button is clicked, the formatting begins. When that's done, the file automatically shows up on the play menu of the Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.
Roxio was also showing off some products it's now developing in its Labs.
MediaTicker works just like a regular RSS feed reader, only it deals in images instead of text. The application shows up as a line of scrolling images at the bottom of the desktop, like this:
Click one of the images and you'll be taken to the site where it originated.
The images can be fed from sites like Flicker (photos), YouTube (video stills) or from blogs like this one. To do this, the URL of the RSS feed is simply pasted into an "add feed" dialog box in the application, just like in text-based news readers.
The Labs have also been working on a product called Buzz, a simple tool that allows you to do some quick and dirty edits on your video, then upload the stuff to sites like YouTube or GoFish with one click.
The video editing in Buzz is very basic, but it might be all most people need. You can cut out unwanted (boring) pieces of your video then glue what remains back together again. That's about it. One thing I liked about the app is that the editing tools are found on the main control wheel in the UI, which might make video editing a little more approachable for some.
After the video is edited, Buzz applies the optimal bit rate and file size for the target video hosting site. It also adds some basic meta data such as title, description, category, etc.
Buzz is also one of the first video editors to output video in Silverlight (Micrsosoft's answer to Adobe Flash) format. Buzz uploads Silverlight files to Microsoft's "Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live" video hosting site in the same way it does video files to YouTube and GoFish.
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"Today, Apple TV ports only iTunes video to the TV set."
I'm not sure why people, web sites and publications continue to say this. It's simply not true. Apple TV will play ANY video that meets its system requirements. It plays beautiful HD video as well. 720p is a fantastic HD format. So much so that ABC chose it as their standard HD broadcast format.
iTunes is simply the interface through which one organizes their media.