Changing container from avi to mp4

[metabook]

Hello,
I have several videos that I would like to make iTunes/FrontRow friendly (Don't really care about iPod). Since I didn't want to convert to h.264 and I was fine with xvid in mp4, I assumed that I would just be able to input the videos, set the output to mp4, then change the video options to "passthrough". However, when I try this it attempts to put it in an avi container.

I would really prefer not to transcode for time and quality reasons. Can anyone tell me what I SHOULD be doing in this circumstance?

Thank you.

[Jacke]

Passthrough only works with AVI, IIRC.

What you can try: set the fourCC of the video to mp4v, make sure you have 3ivx or some MPEG-4 decoder installed (since the QT decoder might choke on Xvid), then use QTAmateur (or Pro if you have it) to encode to MP4 with Quicktime with passthrough for video and M4A for audio.

[metabook]

I will give it a try and report back. Thanks for the reply.

[Jacke]

Another option if you don't want to mess with the original AVI is to save as a Quicktime file that references the original, and you set change the fourCC on that. (You can change fourcc on Quicktime files with MetaHoot.)