Edible Apple

Now that developers have had time to devour the OS X Lion beta, a number of interesting new features are being discovered, one of which is the inclusion of video encoding directly from the Finder. Simply control click on a media file or files and users can then choose to encode it. Note that the image below shows an option to encode a file in 1080p and that the resulting files are compatible with the entire range of iOS devices. Read into that what you may. There’s also an option to encode a video file into an audio only file, a nice feature that certainly has a niche.

OSX Daily, which first wrote about the new feature last week, postulates that Apple may be trying to make converting video files into iOS compatible files that much easier.

Users wanting an easy way to convert videos for your iPhone or iPad is evidenced by apps like the video to iPhone tool Miro Video Converter sitting at the top of the Mac App Store. It’s clear Apple wants to remove the (perceived) complexity of these kinds of tasks, and building a media encoder into Mac OS X Lion is a great step in that direction.

But as with all features in developer previews of OS X, both new and removed, these may or may not be present by the time Apple gets around to releasing the final version of the OS X update. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that a developer beta of iOS 4.3 included multi-touch gesture controls that Apple included merely for research purposes.