Re: Visual Hub — any news on it living or dying in Yosemite?

My favorite transcoding software (for making .MP4s, etc. after finishing a show) remains Visual Hub... I'm very reluctant to risk losing it with a Yosemite upgrade. I don't have a spare drive for testing, etc., so I need to either take the plunge or not.

Has anyone tested this? TIA for sharing your experiences.

- Mike

Hi Mike,

I haven't used VH for many years, so I have copied it from an old Mac here and it does install and launch on Yosemite. I could convert a file to different formats, but I get an error message when trying to convert to MP4 or WMV. I think that's because I haven't installed some old ffmpg libraries that Visual Hub needs for these formats, and for security reasons I am unwilling to download these onto a new machine.

VH relies on open source encoding algorithms that are 8 years old, and the app has not been updated since 2011. Since then a lot has changed. IMO you can find a lot of better converters now. But if you prefer this app I think it will still run on Yosemite.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Thanks, Ronny!

Yes, when you install VH, it requires that you let it install other libraries which weren't included in the package (probably for licensing reasons, but it automates the process of installing everything else you need).

A few years ago, I think when Lion came out, it broke and — although he had already ceased any further development on the program — its original programmer released a fix for the aspects of it that were broken by the new OS. Of course, he also caught hell from the package's current license-holder and distributor for doing so, thus he swore off making any other fixes after that point. So the next OS that breaks VisualHub will very likely the the last.

I know I'm being old-school, but I love the way it runs, and — in true Mac fashion — "just works." Everything else I ever tried for MP4 and other encodes gives me funky results — even MPEG Streamclip seems much more cumbersome and less reliable, as much as I love that program for other uses, and respect its programmer for both writing his own code for every aspect of its operation, and for giving it away for free.

- Mike

I use MPEG Streamclip for conversion to MP4 all the time and never had any funky results.