Fuzzy Orange

I’d like to love Snow Leopard, I really would. It has so many nice new features and updates. The new expose is gorgeous and running it per application when you have a load of emails open saves to find a window saves so much time. BUT, and its a big but, the current ‘bug’ with the play/pause button on the keyboard ALWAYS launching itunes is really starting to annoy me.

At home I have iTunes open all the time as it syncs with my AppleTV – so it’s not so much a problem. Though it is hugely annoying that when Im listening to spotify and I press pause – it starts playing a track from itunes grrr.
But at work I don’t use itunes for anything – I listen to my iPod or Spotify. So when I press pause or play while in spotify and suddenly itunes loads up – its rather frustrating.

I don’t know if this is a simple bug or if Apple are heading down the MS route and trying to force people to use itunes instead of any “competition” just like MS used to try to force IE as the default browser. I’m hoping its just a bug

If anyone knows a way to fix it that isn’t some horrid renaming patch please let me know

I used visualhub for all my video converting needs (mostly converting to mp4 for my AppleTV), but the developer stopped working on it quite a while ago now.

Yesterday I installed Snow Leopard – with its lovely 64bit core – and started to think it’d be nice to have a video converter that supports dual core 64bit (for the speed) and also is still supported by its developers

I stumbled upon Handbrake. It’s available on OS X, Linux and Windows – and there is a 64bit version out which I’ve downloaded and am now using

It has a nice queue system for stacking up jobs and running them at night, lots of presets (and you can save your own) for various output types. It seems pretty quick too – at least as quick as visualhub and I suspect a bit quicker if I did some back-to-back tests

So if anyone is looking for a replacement for visualhub like I was – give it a go!