I was asked to answer a few questions from you all on the Design Tea podcast, right on the heels of Tim van Damme.
(pardon the random image from the movie)
You can watch the whole thing here. If you do have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks to Linebreak for having me.
With this week’s headline of “Microsoft ‘worked with Apple’ for Silverlight on iPhoneâ€, we’re once more reminded of the grim reality that is video on the internet. In the article, Microsoft proudly boasts how they use standardized H264-encoded video and a HTML5 video element to serve up video to the iPhone, which would otherwise refuse to play its proprietary content due to lack of a browser plugin.
Since the ages of the first images in web browsers, we’ve been eager to see full-motion video on the web. While it was first normal to let people download video files, often heavily compressed and only playable on specific systems, in the late 1990s, the increase of broadband adoption and standardization of internet protocols allowed streaming video to become commonplace. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Realplayer emerged as proprietary solutions for internet video streaming.
After months of searching for a video converting app that would let me choose audio and subtitle tracks contained in the ubiquitous MKV format (which is very common for anime) and re-export it to an iPhone or PS3-ready video with or without burned in subtitles, I gave up. There simply wasn’t an app that would let me do it without undertaking at least 10 manual steps with dubious command-line software and a lot of script rummaging.
Then I found MKVTools. It’s not just super-fast (my previous alternative was Perian+Quicktime, which made gorgeous subtitles, but exporting literally took hours), but it also lets me pick audio/video/subtitle tracks, and 1-click convert it to something my iPhone can play. It’s free, to boot (a few advanced features like queuing are unlocked for a tiny 5 dollars).
The UI and the icon of the app are not that great, unfortunately. I can’t do much about the UI, but here are two nice icons so you can keep it in your dock without flinching. As a bonus, there is an alternative to the modern aluminium replacement icon in ‘toolbox red metallic’ included.
MKVTools can be downloaded here. Icons are for personal usage only.
