So, for xmas this year I acquired a Kodak Zi6, which is a pocket-sized HD camcorder. It seems pretty good overall—certainly more portable and easier to deal with than the old tape-based miniDV camcorder—and it’s trivially easy to get the content off, as it supports a direct USB connection.
The minor complication is that I want to play back the video on my Apple TV. Now, it’s trivial to copy a movie from the Zi6 into iTunes, but these movies don’t show up on the Apple TV. I was puzzled at first, but then I looked carefully at the Apple TV specs: “maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps.” Oh. The Zi6 shoots at 1280 x 720, 30 fps. And, the specs say a maximum of 5 Mbps for video, and the Zi6 shoots somewhat higher than that.
What really surprised me is that almost nobody else seems to have this issue, or rather, I’ve seen very little mention of it anywhere and Googling it has turned up nothing. (The only thing I could find was this thread on the Apple forum, and it’s pretty light.)
So, I have two options: scale down to 960 x 540 or drop down to 24 fps. One of the posters in the aforementioned thread says that changing the frame rate is worse; this seems somewhat reasonable. So, the question is, what to use to convert? I can think of a few options:
• iTunes. There’s a “convert to Apple TV” option that can be selected, but this is opaque; I’m not really sure what exactly it does to make it acceptable. Drop frames? Resize? Both? Ugh.
• QuickTime Pro. This can rescale and has the nice option of doing pass-through on the audio. But the video settings are a bit arcane, and this is slow.
• iMovie. This seems a lot like iTunes—maybe even identical. iMovie can slurp in a movie and export to AppleTV, but there’s a lot of compression there, I think. This might be worthwhile with iMovie ‘09 since that can do image stabilization, which is definitely an issue with these teensy camcorders, but I don’t know how good iMovie ‘09 is because it isn’t out yet.
• Handbrake. Handbrake 0.9.3 will take the raw Zi6 file as input, and then one can fold/spindle/mutilate as much as desired. But it doesn’t offer pass-through on the AAC audio, and it doesn’t seem to want to produce 960 x 540, it seems to want 960 x 528 only, which seems a little odd.
So, anyone else out there with an Apple TV and a Zi6 or one of the other pocket-sized HD camcorders, like the Flip Mino HD or the VadoHD or similar? If so, what do you use to convert to Apple TV?
@Gruber: You have an Apple TV and a Zi6, right? What do you use?