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Mac Movie Software

Movie files come in many flavours on computers. On most websites delivering movies on demand 'Real' and 'Windows Media' are most common. When it comes to feature films however, 'MPEG' and 'DivX' are dominant; MPEG being used in most professional applications, DivX popular for the great compression/quality balance it offers. These last two are sometimes hidden within 'Quicktime' and 'AVI' files - it gets a bit complicated if you dig deeper, but despite numerous formats just a few tools are required to view and process almost everything.

Movie Software Essentials

Quicktime: Included within the Apple Mac OS X Operating System, Quicktime is your main tool for viewing movie files. To do any saving and manipulating of files you'll need to buy the 'Pro' version which unlocks the 'Save' menu items.

Codecs: Whilst Quicktime understands pretty much all Apple authored files you'll pretty quickly come across files it won't play. Often this is because you are missing a 'codec' component. In particular, the MPEG2 codec from Apple is necessary to work with Topfield and DVD files. Directions to useful codecs files are on the links page.

iDVD: The iDVD application makes the creation of stylish DVDs easy. It integrates with iMovie for home videos, but also works well as an easy way of presenting MPEG files converted from your Topfield PVR.

DVD Studio Pro: This is a heavyweight application that opens up all sorts of posibilities for DVD authoring. It's not cheap, but if you get serious about presentation or editing of your own programmes, then this might be the software for you.

Toast: Some people quite happily manage their DVD and CD 'burning' with the Apple Disk Utility but for easy of use and range of options, Toast from Roxio is a software essential. Latest versions can put menus on your DVDs and handle DivX discs and formats for VCD players.

Popcorn: A partner to Toast, the Popcorn software is useful for squeezing the most out of your DVDs. If can compress files to get longer movies onto a single DVD. It also copies mosts DVDs so you can make backups for personal use.