Give me a couple of days; I will upload a new version soon, which will solve the Universal Binary problem and it will be able to convert flv files as well.

So you have three kinds of mov files:

1) Self-contained MOV doesn’t have external dependencies( big file ). A Flatten file contains the whole data( f.ex video tracks, text tracks, multiple audio tracks possibly artwork) everything in one file.

2) Movie Ref: Is a movie files which tracks are references to external files, but can also have tracks of its own. So it’s a kind of hybrid between (1) and (3) this file is generally a couple of mega bytes, it depends on the amount of data stored in.

3) Movie link: holds no data at all but is just a link to an external file ( very small file, a couple of Kilo bytes). A Movie Link contains nothing but only a reference to a file, so you have to edit the original file( in your example the source container is avi, which doesn’t support all the features that the mov container supports). Movie2iTunes creates MOV Link files(3).

f.ex AVI files

1) everything( one audio, one video track [multiple tracks, images, script, references etc not supported]) in one file
2) not supported
3) not supported

Could not be loaded because it is not universal.

I’m not sure it will do what I want.

I have scoured the net, everyone seems to be looking for the same this, a decent script that will automate a bunch of AVI’s to “save as reference” in Quicktime Pro. I found one that works well “Movie2iTunes” by just dragging a load of files onto an applet and it creates a refernce and puts the resulting mov into iTunes but I can’t edit the files ad drop artwork into them for some reason where-as a manually done file in Quicktime lets me change the artwork, so that’s really frustrating since its 99.9% perfect for me

“is an Automator action to flatten every movie Quicktime is able to open”

I am unable to process some flv’s which open fine in QT (with perian)

I have successfully used QT’s save as but for some reason the automator action does not work on them.

if i can help troubleshoot in any way let me know because I have a whole big bunch of FLV that I would like to change to mov’s

Thanks heaps for you efforts

Is there a way to make it so that the results are saved in the same folder as the original?

“The action “Flatten Movies” could not be loaded because it is not Universal.”

Am I doing something wrong??

Please disregard my previous post. I upgraded to “Flatten Movies Version 1.1″ rebooted and all was okay.

Thanks.

log:
7/13/09 12:15:14 PM flatten[320] File /Users/bpl/Desktop/For Ryan 640X480.m4v opened
7/13/09 12:15:14 PM flatten[320] Start flattening to (null)
7/13/09 12:15:14 PM flatten[320] Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-120 “Operation could not be completed. (OSStatus error -120.)” (Directory not found)

• –For the sake of having only one container format to juggle(editing) around
• –iTunes will only accept MOV files
• –iMovie will convert your file, when imported to MOV(so i like to feed iMovie directly with MOV files
• –When collecting vacancy footage from my friends, each of them has a different brand of camera which produces video files with different containers
• –I don’t like to re-compress(takes lot of time) movie files, but only want to passthrough the video track into the MOV container
• –I can cut/copy/paste/join MOV files without re-compressing
• –In some rare cases playing AVI footage, the audio is out of sync, due
  to AVI container limitation, this glitch is fixed by flattening to MOV
• –I don’t like reference movies, I don’t want two different files representing the same video
• –Some divix version plays with Perian decoder when in AVI container, but can be played with Quicktime’s native mp4 decoder when flattened to MOV