How-To: Convert Apple HD Trailers to PCH friendly

[luckyy]

Everyone,

This seems to work for me, so I am going to pass it along... I've been playing with ways to convert the HD trailers on Apple's website to a more compatible format for the PCH. Although the PCH can play the .mov natively, I find that the video codec often causes stuttering during high-action sequences, and of course AAC 5.1 audio gets soft-muxed down to stereo.

So, my solution is to use mplayer's mencoder to convert the AAC 5.1 audio to AC3 5.1 and convert the AVC video to h264 and then mux them together using mkvtool.

This has worked well for me so far... enjoy!

(this is a linux shell script that I use, however, it could easily be altered to a windows batch script if you have mencoder/mkvtools for win32 installed)

Code:

#!/bin/sh
mencoder -channels 6 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=640 -ovc frameno -of rawaudio -o tmp.ac3 $1

mencoder    $1 \
         -o tmp.mp4 \
         -ovc x264 \
         -mc 0 \
         -nosound \
         -x264encopts bitrate=3500:frameref=5:analyse=all:me=umh:subme=7:trellis=2:bframes=1:subq=7:br​do:mixed_refs:weight_b:bime:no_fast_pskip:direct_pred=auto:mixed_refs:nr=200:thr​eads=auto

mkvmerge tmp.mp4 tmp.ac3 -o $2

/bin/rm -f tmp.mp4 tmp.ac3

This script takes two parameters... first one is the input and second is the output (which is in mkv format)

Hope someone else finds this useful too

[crombiecrunch]

I use Any DvD Converter does a great job and is easy to use

Code:

http://www.any-dvd-converter.com/

[BuddyBoy]

AVC is H.264. You're re-encoding for no good reason in my opinion.

All you have to do is convert the audio, and remux into a different container if wanted. I'd do something like this:

D:\DVTools\ffmpeg>ffmpeg -i startrek-clip_h1080p.mov -vcodec copy -acodec ac3 -ac 6 -ab 384k -ar 48000 -f matroska startrek.mkv

Took about two seconds for that 40 second clip.