Adding Your Own Media : Rip, mix, bum, Playing movies, Video conversion

We’ve touched on the issue of import­ing your own content, not bought from the iTunes Store, into iTunes and play­ing it on iOS devices. Let’s take a closer look at how you can bring various kinds of audio and video into your Apple home entertainment system, and what conversion processes you might need to make them playable.

It’s easy to rip CDs in iTunes. Check your import settings first to trade quality against file size

Rip, mix, bum

Apple got a bit of flak when it used this slogan to promote the original iMac and iTunes, and that’s hardly surprising: record companies would really prefer you to buy your favorite tracks all over again when you want to listen to them on a different device, not convert them yourself. Technically, it’s still against the law in the UK to copy or ‘rip’ the contents of a CD to your Mac, but it’s now widely accepted as the norm and the government is expected to change the law soon to reflect this.

In iTunes > Preferences > General, you’ll find a button called Import Settings. Click this and you can choose from various encoders.

iTunes has the built-in facility to import CDs, and indeed will offer to do so by default whenever you insert an audio disc into your Mac’s drive. That’s assuming it has a drive: with more models ditching it, including the Mac mini and MacBook Air range, it may not be long before you have to raid the attic for a machine that can play your music. All the more reasons get your CD collection into iTunes now.

In iTunes > Preferences > General, you’ll find a button called Import Settings. Click this and you can choose from various encoders. AAC is Apple’s preferred format; it’s great for producing small files at high audio quality. MP3 isn’t as efficient, but this is available too, along with uncom­pressed AIFF and WAV. If you mainly stick to Apple kit, AAC is the best choice; for top quality you can alternatively use Apple Lossless, which produces files at around half the size of uncompressed audio with no audible loss of quality. Given that uncompressed files are about ten times bigger than the compressed formats most of us are accustomed to, however, that’ll fill up your hard disk much faster, not to mention the storage on your iOS devices, so it’s strictly an audiophile indulgence.

MP3 files do have the advantage that they’ll play on everything, while AAC is really the preserve of Apple.

Under the AAC or MP3 options you can choose a bit rate - 320kbps will offer the best quality - and you should deactivate Variable Bit Rate encoding to preserve fidel­ity. Even a fairly large music library ripped using these settings is unlikely to fill up a modern hard drive too quickly.

If you want high quality on your Mac without over-stuffing your iOS devices, pick high-quality import settings in iTunes, then connect your device, select it in the left pane and go to its Summary tab on the right. Scroll down to Options, tick 'Convert higher bit rate songs to...’ and choose a lower bit rate. This will limit the quality, and thus the file size, that will be synced to this device, without affecting the master files in the iTunes library on your Mac.

Playing movies

After a slow start, the iTunes Store is now a pretty good place to find movies and TV series, so a lot of people will buy or rent most of their content through it - just as Apple intends. But you may also need to play back video files that you already have from other sources, or footage that you’ve made yourself using iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Premiere, or had sent to you by other people in formats such as those favored by Windows.

Perian

Apple’s ecosystem is quite restric­tive in terms of the formats and codecs it allows natively, while the wider digi­tal video world has lots of formats and file types. So you might end up with MPEGs, AVIs and Windows Media files, for example, that iTunes won’t recognize and which can’t be streamed to an Apple device by the standard means, synced directly to iOS, or even played back on your Mac, without a little tinkering.

Converting movie files is a lot more complex, and in some cases more legally risky, than ripping audio tracks, but the good news is that there are more options for video format shifting than you might expect, without getting too deeply into technical issues.

If you’re just trying to play back movies on your Mac that are in formats OS X doesn’t understand, one of the best free players around is VLC, from videolan.org. A recent version 2 update has simpli­fied the app’s interface and made it more iTunes-like, and VLC has a reputation for being able to play any kind of video file you can throw at it - even the obscure MKV format that’s sometimes encountered on the internet. It can also handle WMV (Windows Media Video) files, which can otherwise be really problematic on the Mac, and has playlist and transcoding features thrown in as well.

Another essential and free addition to any Mac is the Perian codec pack, available from perian.org. This installs a selection of codecs that will enable the default QuickTime Player app to open most video file types with no conversion necessary, and it can be a real life-saver. If you’re look­ing for something a little more advanced to deal with Windows Media files, the Flip4Mac software from www.telestream.net adds export components for most video apps that run on the Mac, enabling you to create as well as open and edit WMV movies. There is a charge, but the playback- only components can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website (bit.ly/msflip4mac) and won’t cost a penny.

Opening a WMV movie in QuickTime Player and exporting it to an iTunes-com-partible format is usually best, since WMV support on the Mac is pretty sketchy.

Video conversion

What if you want to convert movies to Apple-friendly formats for future use, rather than just find a way of playing their existing formats? Software already on your Mac may be able to help. ITunes itself has considerable conversion skills, but only sup­ports a limited range of input formats: it’ll handle .mov and .mp4 files, for instance, but not AVI or WMV. Apps such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere can import a wider range of video and output to iTunes-friendly formats.

iFlicks converts a wide range of video formats to those supported by Apple devices

MPEG StreamClip, free from squared5. com, is a video player and converter that can accept a range of QuickTime-based movie formats (though not Windows Media) and output them to a range of others. There are some handy Apple device presets, as well as detailed export settings if you want them.

iFlicks is available from the Mac App Store at a relatively pricey $23, but is a really elegant video format converter that’s geared specifically towards changing a range of formats into ones that will play nicely with your Apple devices. Drag and drop movies into its window and it’ll pull all available metadata off the internet, usually including artwork and full title details, and these will show up on your device post-con­version. It has presets for all Apple devices, including the new iPad and Apple TV, and features a queue so you can leave it con­verting while you go and do other things.

iFlicks produces high-quality H.264 movies and can add them straight to your iTunes library automatically after encod­ing. You’ll want a relatively recent Mac with at least a Core 2 Duo processor, and more cores in your Mac will mean a shorter wait for results.

Neither of those apps will convert video from a commercial DVD. One tool that will, despite the copy protection, is HandBrake. Now, again it’s technically illegal to copy DVDs, but the law is moving towards per­mitting personal content-shifting. It seems reasonable to most consumers, and even too many people in the movie industry, that if you’ve paid for a film on DVD you should be able to watch it on your iPad too. What you really mustn’t do is rip DVDs and give the copies to other people or upload them to websites. Given the recent Mega-upload raid, it’s probably wise not even to keep such files on a private server or storage service if it’s exposed to the internet.

Handbrake, free from handbrake.fr, is a rather nifty app that will read video from a DVD and let you select chapters or entire features to then convert into iOS-friendly formats using either the high quality H.264 codec or the faster but slightly lowers MPEG-4. These files can be dragged into iTunes and synced, shared or copied to your iOS devices, letting you enjoy your legally purchased content without a DVD player.

Roxio’s Toast Titanium is pricey, but very useful if you do a lot of video conversion

If you need to do the reverse, and get a movie from a digital file format onto a DVD, that’s much simpler. An easy way is to use iDVD, if you have it; there’s no need to bother with the menus and music (unless you want to), just drag your file in, set the render quality and hit Burn Disc to produce a DVD playable on any commercial DVD player, computer, PS3 or Xbox.

If you shoot video on a DSLR or cam­corder, you may find the bundled software is Windows-only. The best bet may be to stick the SD card into the card reader on your iMac, Mac mini or MacBook Pro and open the resulting files either in QuickTime Player, with Perian installed, or VLC (see previous page). To watch the footage on an iPad or other device, convert it using one of the apps we’ve mentioned above.

Roxio’s Toast ($132 from roxio.com) is great for converting videos and burning DVDs, and supports plenty of input for­mats, including those like AVCHD that are generated by the latest camcorders.