For a while now I have been searching the web for a free application for Mac OS X that would allow me to convert a movie in flv format from YouTube to my iPhone. I came across a wide variety of applications like iSquint, VisualHub and FilmRedux, these were free applications that should have allowed me to convert my movie. Unfortunately both iSquint and VisualHub has gone out of production, and I was unable to download them from their creators Techspansion.

As I don’t quit I had to find another solution, that was free to use. I have used Handbreak for converting other things before, although I couldn’t find any information about their support of flv, I had to try it out.

Success! Handbrake now supports universal input and therefor converts flv to any other format that is supported by Handbrak. The creators have tapped into the power of the FFmpeg project and have had a massive achievement by this.

You can download it at http://www.handbrake.fr

I used version 0.9.3, which at this time is the current version.

Supported sources

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD, and some .VOB and .TS files
• Most multimedia files it can get libavformat to read and libavformat to decode

Outputs

• File format: Mp4, mkv, avi or ogm
• Video: mpeg-4, h.264 or theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
• Audio: aac, mp3, vorbis or ac-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Other features

• Chapter selection
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, copping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

I downloaded a video from google (Zeitgeist) and tried to convert it, so that I could bring it along in my iPhone. It worked out easily. I couldn’t see or hear any quality reduction and there was no watermark. Best of all it only took about 3-4 clicks in one window before it was encoding into mp4. So I think that is very easy!

Tagged: Convert, flv, handbrak, iphone, mp4, Tutorial, video