Product Reviews

RoadMovie is a neat little piece of software. It allows you to process movie files, add chapters, subtitles and metadata, access the tracks and finally output the movie so that it can be played on a wide variety of devices, such as an iPod classic, nano or touch, or Apple TV.

The application is from the same developer as Submerge (see MacUser, 27 February 2009, p30) and uses its excellent subtitling engine. All major formats - SubRip (.srt), SubViewer 1 & 2 (.sub), SubStation alpha (.ssa) and MicroDVD are supported - and the Quartz rendering ensures that they are always readable. The subtitled movie can also be previewed in a QuickLook-style window if the built-in preview is too small.

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One quibble is that the subtitle settings are in a different place in RoadMovie than they are in Submerge: they are under the Preferences menu.

Adding chapters is as straightforward as it could be. You either set the points at pre-determined time intervals (anything between one and 30 minutes), or just scrub to a point in the movie, hit the '+' button and type in a chapter name. And that's it.

Adding metadata to movies enables them to be correctly handled by iTunes, the iPhone and iPod classic, nano or touch. You can tag them so that they appear under the correct category (Music, TV Shows or Movies) and they'll display other types of data such as artist, director, series and episode name.

You can also access the various tracks that your movie may contain and choose to turn them on or off. This might not make much sense for the video or audio tracks, but you can turn off subtitle tracks if you want to, or choose between multiple languages in a subtitle set.

RoadMovie exports to all manner of devices such as Apple TV, mobile phones, the iPhone, the iPod classic, nano or touch, a Nintendo Wii, PS3 (480p and 720p), PSP and the Internet. The one thing missing from that list is DVD - a big omission, we think. Here's hoping it gets added in a future release.