My Apple TV Arrived - New CastCluster Release

My Apple TV finally showed up, so I started actually trying to move some youtube video through CastCluster and onto my TV... Right away, iTunes complained about pushing my converted videos... wtf? they're quicktime and play fine in iTunes... just the wrong flavor of quicktime, I guess... so I dig deeper... The specs for Apple TV list basically two acceptable formats... H.264 (with AAC audio) and MPEG-4 (with AAC audio).

After several hours of research and screwing around with various shinny bobbles for conversion of flash video, I land back on ffmpeg with x264 and FAAC support compiled in. And as luck would have it ffmpegx is a GUI for ffmpeg on OSX that happens to include the binary for ffmpeg with all required libs compiled in!

The result of all this, is a simplified set of requirements for installing CastCluster (eliminated the need for the flv2mpeg4 utility), youtube videos that make it all the way to my TV that don't look half bad, and a new release of CastCluster (see featured download on google project page).

Locally, I also have eliminated the need for a web container as I have embedded Jetty running... now that's a slick little container! So in the next few days I think there will be another release that can be deployed without Tomcat or some other container.

If you get this thing running (or not) under linux or windows, please let me know... as long as you can get a working binary of ffmpeg, it should work, but I'm really curious.