Converting Videos & Permute

Vidarium plays the video formats your Apple devices support natively, such as MOV, MP4, and M4V. Other formats — MKV, AVI, WMV and similar — still get thumbnails and hover-scrub previews, but they can't be played directly.

Converting unsupported videos

On the Mac, opening such a video offers to convert it first (or to open it in an external player instead). The Conversion Setup sheet shows the file's details, lets you pick a preset, and offers to replace the original with the converted file — the original is only removed after the new file has been verified and indexed, but the replacement itself cannot be undone, so check the preset's output quality first.

While a video converts, its tile shows the progress and estimated time remaining, with a button to cancel. The converted file appears next to the original when it finishes.

Powered by Permute

Conversion uses the engine from Permute, our media converter. Out of the box, Vidarium converts with a default high-quality preset (HEVC in an MP4 container); videos that are already HEVC or H.264 are simply repackaged without re-encoding, which is fast and lossless.

If Permute is installed, the presets you have set up there appear in the Conversion Setup sheet, and Vidarium remembers the one you used last.