If you are an Apple enthusiast (and even we suspect if you’re not) you’ll know that Apple makes high quality electronics for the home. The only time this tech heaven ever becomes less of a perfect world for some users is if those users are not 100% invested in the Apple ecosystem. Apple likes to work in a kind of “closed room” in a sense, with the confines of your world being inside the walls of iPod, iPhone, Mac, and most specifically Apple TV and iTunes. If you buy TV shows and films from iTunes it is assumed that to view them on an actual TV set (rather than a iPhone or iPad) you will be happy to buy an Apple TV and stay within the ecosystem. This is fine if you are actually happy to do that. It’s great, but what if you either don’t want to or can’t do that? What if your media ecosystem features Apple products, and also contains Android, Raspberry Pi homebrew kit, Windows computers, and Linux boxes? What would be helpful is if you could shunt the content you paid for onto some other device easily without having to hit the metal too hard.
DRM be gone
If your living room media player and TV didn’t originate in Cupertino, California, then you have a problem, but TunesKit DRM M4V Converter is a clean and simple tool for that aim. If you have for example a Raspberry Pi running OSMC or use the USB media player in the back of your TV, you will constantly come up against the ironically named “Fairplay DRM” encoding on all iTunes video files. Tuneskit DRM M4V Converter (available for both Mac and Windows) neatly sidesteps that DRM or digital rights management that was designed to stop the sharing of files illegally. But that shouldn’t stop legal owners of the content from viewing it where it is convenient. Tuneskit presents you with a simple and clean interface in which it is obvious what needs to be done.
A series of preference screens allow you to select any kind of HD or SD video and audio and even web video like YouTube and Vimeo.
Plus you can select support for the resolutions of a large range of popular devices.
The software will start your iTunes automatically, and you will need to authorise the computer to play iTunes videos (if you haven’t already done so). The reason all this happens is that Tuneskit seems to use iTunes to play back the video and capture the stream as it plays. Then you import files to convert by clicking the “Add” button and, because iTunes is open, the software knows the location of your iTunes videos.
Hit the big blue “Convert” button, and off you go. If you are using a trial of the software, it is limited to five minutes of encoding, but you can buy it and register for full-length captures.
A progress wheel shows the capture happening, and the file is saved to disc in the specified location.
All done, and you can drag your media to any device and play it wherever you like.
Conclusion
Self evidently the sidestepping of DRM encoding is a bit of a grey area legally. Of course you should have the right to do as you please with something you purchase, but of course Apple and the MPAA may take a dim view of this kind of thing. Provided you own the media you are converting, however, it’s fair enough to copy them for yourself as far as we’re concerned. The software is easy and pleasant to use, and the resulting captures of the videos are good quality and stand up well against the quality of the original content. You can tweak the settings and ease off the compression to reduce any visible artifacts. The defaults are for small file sizes, and so quite highly compressed, but if quality is your thing, you can have that at the cost of big files. Your choice. Plus, the capture is the same resolution as the original unless you set it differently. All in all an easy solution and trouble-free.
