Jendrik Bertram has announced iFlicks 1.4, an update to his video utility for Mac OS X. Featuring an easy-to-use interface, iFlicks will convert and optimize video files to play on iTunes, Front Row, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Version 1.4 can create video files from H.264 content (.mkv, .flv) that will be directly playable on Apple devices without re-encoding.

iFlicks lets you import video files into iTunes to play in the iTunes application, Front Row, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. Bertram says it was developed from the ground up utilizing the latest Cocoa technologies and offers a range of functions to manage metadata of any movie or TV show library.

iFlicks supports a variety of video formats, including QuickTime (.mov), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), H.264/MPEG-4 (.mp4) and Matroska (.mkv). Most features are directly accessible using the integrated iTunes Script menu. At any time, processed videos can automatically be added to the iTunes Library or any playlist.

Additionally, iFlicks directly supports TMDb. By leveraging TMDb's application programming interface, imported movies can be enriched by the extensive amount of metadata and artwork available, according to Bertram. iFlicks also supports the vast repository of TV show related data available from TheTVDB. This data is used to recognize TV shows and add corresponding metadata.

In many cases, both TMDb and TheTVDB even provides a short overview, which is displayed right in Front Row. Everything from name, artwork, actors, directors, HD tag up to special ids is written directly to the video file. This even allows for HD-SD combos in iTunes (a single entry containing a HD and SD version of the same file).

With iFlicks' built-in movie player, you can preview a movie. The application offers standard controls such as play, pause, stop, fast forward, and rewind -- all with full screen playback support. At any time, iFlicks can resume a movie from the point it was stopped.

By leveraging the power of AppleScript, iFlicks is scriptable, too. Almost all operations of the program can be controlled directly from the Script Menu in iTunes. A collection of sample scripts are automatically installed with the application. In addition, there are Folder Action Scripts which can allows iFlicks to trigger actions by dropping files into specific folders.

iFlicks requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher, iTunes 10.2 or later and QuickTime. It's Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macxs.

iFlicks 1.4 is available as a single-user license for approximately US$19.99 at the product web site (http://www.iflicksapp.com/) or the Mac App Store. A demo is available for download.