Liberate Your Memories

Just like those pictures that I maybe wouldn’t take the time to look through otherwise, I’ve decided to start converting some of our home movies to play on the Apple TV. One of the big problems with the movie footage we have on tapes or in iMovie is that we never watch it. Getting our home movies on to the Apple TV means that we actually get to enjoy reliving some of those memories together.

The first step is to get the video into a format that will play on the Apple TV. If your home movies are in iMovie, then it’s a simple matter to export or share to iTunes. I would recommend VisualHub, but Techspansion shuttered their doors just earlier this week (literally, the day I started to write this post — I’m still not over it). If your movies are already on DVD, Handbrake will convert them for you. Also, the latest development snapshot of Handbrake will accept multiple file formats (not just DVD) for input so it can take the place of VisualHub in many cases. Targeting Apple TV is a matter of selecting the appropriate preset and clicking start. MPEG Streamclip is another tool that can help convert video from one format to another. QuickTime Pro also has some limited options for converting video.

Once you have video in the correct format, you just need to provide some extra information about your videos so that iTunes can properly identify them to your Apple TV.

Tagging the Past

One of the keys to get full enjoyment out of my Apple TV is the killer program MetaX. This little gem allows you to set and manipulate all the meta-data for iTunes media files including cover art. What I do (and this is the really clever part) is to set all my movies as episodes of a TV Show named “Home Movies.”

What’s cool about this is that all my Home Movies appear together in the Apple TV menus under TV Shows : Home Movies. I can further organize them by year (using “Season”) and I can write down who appears in the movie in the “Artist” and “Actors” sections. “Description” and “Date” are obvious and make browsing the movies on the Apple TV convenient. MetaX also allows you to grab a frame from the video and set that as the cover art for your home movie as well. MetaX is donationware, free to download and use, but please consider donating something via PayPal.

Personal Media Bliss

So now I have all these home movies that otherwise would never have seen the light of a display all organized in iTunes and synced to my Apple TV. They are all together, sorted by date, include information about what’s happening and who’s in the movie, and display a frame (that I picked) to represent the cover art. Most importantly, all those old home movies are finally being watched and enjoyed, which I’m pretty sure is what we all had in mind when we filmed the event in the first place.

Good luck with liberating your own memories and media files. If you have any other ideas, particularly for tagging, please share your tips and tricks in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: The Live-Stream Video Market
• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Techspansion developer Tyler Loch, maker of the incredibly useful multimedia manipulation tools VisualHub, iSquint and AudialHub, has announced he is discontinuing all further development.

“…After much soul-searching (it’s not you, it’s me), for personal reasons, Techspansion is closing its virtual doors. The Support Forum and Support E-mail will be available for a while longer to take care of any remaining issues for you. “

Thanks for all your support. It’s been a fun ride.

This has been the main tool I use to convert content for the iPhone & Apple TV and the continued enhancements will be sorely missed, especially if Apple patches or new OS releases cause the software to break.

While there are other programs out there, VisualHub provided a clean interface with very helpful pre-sets that made it a snap to do batch conversions. Tyler was always very helpful with support questions and seems to truly appreciate his user community.

What will replace Techspansion tools in your Applications folder? What are your key conversion utilities? How will the loss of these applications impact your workflow? Drop a note in the comments with your suggestions for other TAB readers or just to say “thank you!” to Tyler for his contribution to the Mac community.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories