September, 2009

Everywhere I looked people were recommending the use of either Handbrake, VisualHub or iSquint to make videos iTunes compatible. They all work but require fiddling with settings, iTunes hackery and obviously aren’t from Apple. One would be forgiven for thinking that Apple didn’t approve of this sort of importing given that these tools existed for this very purpose. Little did I know QuickTime has been exporting to iTunes forever, making it possible to convert downloaded movies into iTunes compatible formats so you can load them onto your favorite Apple device. However, this export option has always required the Pro license of QuickTime. At least that was the case until Snow Leopard and QuickTime X.

In Snow Leopard the plain old QuickTime Player has a Share menu which lets you export any video that QuickTime can read into iTunes formats for iPod/iPhone, Apple TV and “Computer”. The shared videos are added to your media library and can then be synced with whatever device you choose.

Three easy steps:

1. Open the video you downloaded in QuickTime X
2. Click on the Share menu and select iTunes…
   
3. Choose the output format of your choice, keep in mind QuickTime will not scale your movie up, so your choices are limited based on the current resolution of the movie. You’ll find that only True HD movies (1080p+) can be exported to Computer format. Don’t worry about it, just choose the best option it gives you.
   

That’s it! Nice and easy.

For those interested in the actual output resolutions, the answer is it depends on the source resolution. By and large the iPhone/iPod size will try to constrain the width to 640 pixels. Apple TV will attempt to get close to 720p and Computer will attempt to get close to 1080p.

Somehow this slipped under my radar. Apparently both Mozilla and Webkit have gained experimental support for WebGL. WebGL is going to expose OpenGL ES 2.0 (the same version of OpenGL you find in an iPhone) in JavaScript to be rendered inside a canvas tag. This is without a doubt, the most exciting thing to happen for web-based games ever. It ends up being a standards based, platform agnostic, hardware accelerated rendering method bundled as an extension to JavaScript, using a tag that is already part of the HTML 5 standard.

This is a huge piece of the puzzle that is going to allow the creation of web-based 3D games that can take advantage of hardware acceleration. So which pieces are missing? Not too many as it turns out. New implementations of JavaScript in both Firefox and Safari are very fast, making render loops and input capture entirely possible within the browser window. Video and audio have both got standards support in HTML 5. The only thing I can think of that’s missing is server initiated communication and peer to peer networking that would be necessary for real-time multiplayer games. Yeah you can poll a server making it possible to have multiplayer turn-based games or even real-time games where latency isn’t an issue. For 3D shooters and MMOs however, I would wager the networking piece is still mighty important.

Can’t wait to get my hands dirty with this stuff.

I’m posting this so I don’t need to go hunting on Google (which was surprisingly tight-lipped about the right solution) the next time I have to do this. If you want to convert a certificate issued in the .crt & .key formats for Apache to the .p12 format favored by IIS you need to run this command in linux:

openssl pkcs12 -export -out iis.p12 -inkey apache.key -in apache.crt

Replace IIS / Apache with the appropriate filenames and you’re done. The .p12 file can be directly imported into the Certificates MMC Snap-In on Windows for use in IIS. The command works on any system that can run openssl, including Mac OS X.