It’s been quiet here lately. Here’s an update: I have not abandoned rooVid. However, it’s not where I wanted it to be at this time. First, excuses:

• day job has been a tad hectic
• rooSwitch is a product that I didn’t really plan to productive prior to rooVid. I’m glad I did though. I think I learned a lot that will help make rooVid a lot better than it would have been.

So what’s the new plan? You can see that I changed roobasoft.com’s main page to say rooVid would be available “later this year” instead of the previous July/August release time frame. Here’s the new (very rough) schedule:

Late August: release rooSwitch 1.1 (this will have some features that the product really needs)

“Later this year”:

• put rooSwitch into maintenance release mode for the time being. Bug fixes. Jot down ideas for 1.2, 1.5 and 2.0 but don’t devote too much time to it.
• resume work on rooVid 1.0, the full version.

Even during this quiet time, rooVid continues to get a good amount of downloads per day and the occasional bug report / beta request / “I like this” email. This is encouraging and will help push me along.

rooVid Lite 1.0.2 is available for download

1.0.2 is a maintenance release with the following fixes:

• Editing an advanced profile would always switch the settings back to MPEG4. Now it correctly initializes the settings to the saved values.
• If your encoding went for longer then 60 minutes the time would show as “1 hours”. Now it correctly displays as “1 hour”.
• While encoding one or more videos, if you closed the main window using the windows close icon it would ask if you wanted to cancel the quit (due to active encodes). However, saying ‘cancel’ would put you in an endless loop where it continued to ask the question over and over.
• Removing the preferences but not the Application Support would cause the default profiles to be created again.

rooVid Lite 1.0.1 is available for download

1.0.1 is a maintenance release with the following fixes:

• Editing the ‘advanced’ profile started the user off with a frames per second and height and width settings that were invalid. The defaults are now 30 frames per second and 320×240.
• rooVid Lite now verifies a minimum of QuickTime 7.0.3 is installed. Attempting to use previous versions of QuickTime was causing problems.
• Exporting a profile to an existing file was appending to the file, now it appropriately replaces.
• Quitting rooVid Lite while in the middle of creating a new profile left a straggling “Untitled” profile. This has been fixed such that this “Untitled” profile no longer exists.
• Fixed bug where canceling queued tasks could cause subsequent jobs to go to ‘queued’ when they should have started. It was possible to get in a state where no further jobs would run and an app restart was required.
• Fixed bug where the details string in the profile editors “more details” section would show odd results when viewing the details for an iPod profile.
• Fixed bug where the details string in the profile editor for the iPod and Web profiles was not updating after the user changed the codec settings.

rooVid Lite 1.0 is available for download.

There are no major changes from beta 5 to 1.0 (except it’s non-beta status). Many thanks to all those that reported bugs and/or gave words of encouragement. I’m happy with the condition of this 1.0 and am very excited about the future.

Work has begun on the full version of rooVid as well as a 1.1 release of rooVid Lite. Look for both in the coming months.

rooVid Lite 1.0 beta 5 is available for download

• Pause, resume and cancel now provide immediate feedback, even when doing ‘pause all’ and ‘resume all’
• You can now set ‘artist’, ‘genre’ and ‘album’ for your iPod profiles
• Undo / redo now appropriately updates the UI
• You can now ‘duplicate’ profiles
• You can now sort profiles by ‘name’ or by ‘type’
• Added the first draft of help pages
• Fixed bug where QuickTime 7.0.4 users could not use the H.264 codec when creating an iPod profile
• Fixed bug where queued jobs could make it such that they overwrite each others output file
• Fixed bug where the profile editor would not save it’s state if you expanded the ‘more details’
• Fixed bug where the profile editor would not be run ‘modal’ for new profiles

Beta 5 is hopefully the last beta. Please let me know of any bugs you find, no matter how small.

rooVid Lite 1.0 beta 4 is available for download

• Renamed this free version of rooVid to “rooVid Lite”. The shareware version (not yet available) will be simply “rooVid”
• AppleScript support for encoding a video
• Preference for bouncing dock icon after encode (disabled by default)
• Slight adjustments to the layout of the UI
• Added the following menu items: “Pause all running”, “Resume all paused” and “Clear all completed”.
• Fixed bug where the profile dialog would cascade it’s way around the screen as you open and closed it
• Fixed bug where the new profile dialog would not dismiss
• Fixed bug where the default “Web Small” was not encoding

rooVid 1.0 beta 3 is available for download

1.0b3 includes the following changes:

• rooVid is now a Universal Binary
• New in-app icons and a new document icon for exported .rooVid profiles.
• Fixed bug where new MPEG-4 profiles would sometimes be described as “Multipass” when they weren’t Multipass
• The bitrate setting is now included in the details preview for a profile
• The quality slider for the ‘web’ profile type is now working
• The encode… menu item was not disabling itself if no profile was selected, now it does
• Fix bug where rooVid would warn before quiting when you had a finished encode that wasn’t ackowledged
• If QuickTime 7.0.4 is installed, disable exporting to iPod using H.264. This is a temporary hack until I can figure out how to get it to work correctly (sorry).

I just became aware of a fairly nasty bug. If you create a profile to export your video to an iPod using the H.264 codec, the video that is produced is not viewable on video iPods (sorry). There are work arounds, but none are good:

1) use MPEG-4 as the codec. 2) ask iTunes to make the resulting video iPod compatible

I understand what’s wrong and this will be fixed in beta 3 (probably Monday or Tuesday night). I don’t feel so good about this, but here’s the good news: beta 3 will almost certainly be a Universal Binary. I’ve got rooVid compiling as Universal (no effort required) and my new iMac shows up on Monday. I don’t expect any issues, but I probably just cursed myself. We’ll see.

rooVid 1.0 beta 2 is available for download

changes include:

• added a preference window
• fixed bug where a new iPod profile would have poor settings if you didn’t select “more details” when creating the profile
• ability to check for new versions
• implemented the ability to Import / Export profiles
• fixed up some icons and minor wording changes

Yes, beta 2 was released only two days after beta 1, but I had gotten quite a bit done and fixed one nasty bug so I wanted to get this out ASAP. Future releases shouldn’t be this close together. We’ll see how I do at that.

Who: Anyone who takes iMovie projects and/or QuickTime videos and exports them to some other format (iPod, web, etc).

What: What is rooVid? Well, if you take iMovie projects or QuickTime videos and export them to your video iPod, the web or any custom QuickTime settings you’ll appreciate rooVid. rooVid allows you to create “profiles” that describe the output type of the video. For example, I edit short home movies in iMovie. I then put the videos on my iPod and upload two different versions to my families website for the rest of our family and friends to see. Before rooVid, this was a painful process that involved remembering the QuickTime settings and adjusting them each time. With rooVid I take the iMovie project, drop it on my profiles and let it do it’s thing. I then sync my iPod and upload the other two videos and I’m done.

When: Now. Head over to rooVid’s product page to download the beta.

Pricing: free. There will be a pro version in the future, but there will always be a free version.

Here’s a screenshot of rooVid encoding one video for three different purposes and also another video going just for the iPod: