Handbrake and FFmpegX

[excdngrunt]

Long story short-ish; I have a few mp4's I ripped with handbrake. Now that I have an external burner for my Ibook, I thought I would like to put a few of them to DVD and free up some hard drive space. Apperantly they have to be encoded to mpeg2, because Toast, or any other burning software won't regonize the .mp4 files. Trying to use ffmpegX and I'm having all sorts trouble. Mpeg 2 default settings take forever, and i'm not getteing any sound. Tried the mpeg 4 with .MOV extension, and got sound which went out of sync after about 3 minutes of play. I've been messing around with different settings for about a week now (hoping to random chance really) and not getting anything but frustrated (specially with my PC using buddies laughing at me). It's taking between 2 to 18 hours per encoding try, and I'm really at my wit's end waiting all that time to find out it didn't work. Does any body know what settings I need to use to get this done? or Have an alternate means of getting these files to DVD? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in Advance.

I'm using a G3 900mhz iBook, with 640 megs of RAM.

exCDNgrunt

[TugBoat]

Easiest way is to throw the mp4 into the video tab of Toast 6 and select DVD-Video. ffmpegX still has problems with AAC audio soundtracks, and general problems with soundtracks period. If you want to try ffmpegX, I would suggest the following.

Open the mp4, go to Quick Presets and choose DVD ffmpeg. Since your source material is probably not DVD quality, I would suggest using the Half DVD setting. This will give you a DVD with Half the horizontal resolution, a much faster encode, and the ability to choose a much lower bitrate without quality loss.

Set the framerate to 29.97, set Autosize to Half DVD for 4:3 source material or DVD 16:9 for 16:9 source material. If you choose DVD 16:9, you then have to set the Video size back to 352x480 for Half DVD. Set the Video Bitrate to 2000, this is for half DVD and will allow you to put two 2-hour movies on one DVD.

Go to the Audio tab, set the Audio bitrate to something close to the audio bitrate of your original movie. Set the Channels to Stereo. This is really not necessary as I don't recommend using the audio from the video encode, it will make encoding faster though.

Go to the Options tab. Now, if your source material is not true 4:3 or 16:9, you have the choice of fooling around with Auto or Manual letterboxing. If you want Auto letterboxing, without cropping, choose the Decode with Quicktime option. This will negate any manual settings for letterboxing and cropping that you choose in the Filters tab and take twice as long to do the encode. Your choice. I'm not even going to get into manual letterboxing, this post is too long already. For Profile, make sure it's set to DVD. I always set the Keyframe interval to 15 for 29.97fps and 12 for 23.98fps. I don't recommend 23.98fps. And if you're going to Author in DVDSP, I would recommend using two-pass encoding.

Press Encode. Once the progress has reached 1 or 2%, you can open the Preview window and see the output. When finished, You'll end up with a mpeg file, a Video_TS folder and image. If your original soundtrack was AAC, there is a chance that you won't have an audio track in the finished files. Also, you'll probably notice that the audio is out of sync near the end of the movie. You need to demux the mpeg file (trash the Video_TS folder and image), and save the m2v stream to use in an Authoring program. Now go back to the original AVI/MOV and choose the Movie audio to 'mp2 or ac3' preset to obtain a correct duration audio track. Use that audio file with the m2v video file that you got from the demuxed mpeg when you go to build a DVD.

Use those settings on another AVI/MOV and then use Sizzle or DVDSP to build a two track (movie) DVD with menu to select between different movies. Or, you can just use Toast for a single track DVD. If you want anymore info, see my posts in the ffmpegX forum. And I don't do Sizzle, you'll have to find that info elsewhere 8)

[AntnyMD]

Long story short-ish; I have a few mp4's I ripped with handbrake. Now that I have an external burner for my Ibook, I thought I would like to put a few of them to DVD and free up some hard drive space.

Why dont you just burn the mp4's as data (rather than a DVD Video)? Since you ripped the DVDs with Handbrake, I assume you still have the originals somewhere...

[excdngrunt]

Thanks for the tips i'll give it a whirl and see what happens. I really like the handbrake application for it's ease of use, among other things. But failing this, I'll just have to use something else for future rips.

As for making a DVD of the files instead of a Data CD, well I think they would be better to view on my home theartre system than my little (but beautiful) iBook. My main reason for all of this is we just moved and the moving company lost about 2/3rds of my DVD collection, and I want to back up the ones I got left. I appreciate all the help.

Cheers!

exCDNgrunt

[TugBoat]

Well, I ran into the same problem you did with a .mov that contains a 3ivx MPEG4 video and AAC audio track. It took way longer than it should have and didn't give me an audio track. It's over here;
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1095544#1095544
I'm still waiting on an answer.
Did you happen to notice if ffmpeg was writing the movie in memory verses the HD?

BTW, I was unable to get ffmpegX to give me a soundtrack using the Movie audio or Audio file presets. I had to use Quicktime Pro to get a soundtrack from that movie. My guess is ffmpegX has BIG problems with AAC audio. I tossed the same movie into the Toast 6.07 Video tab and it appeared that things were fine. So, you can either play around with ffmpegX for a video track, then use QT Pro for a sound track, or, just use Toast :P

++++++++++++++
OR,
Trash the AAC file, then use ffmpegX on the video only movie, then use QT Pro to export a wav audio file that ffmpegX will then convert to AC3. Seems ffmpegX works fine without that AAC audio.

You can do this by,
Use the Finder to make a copy of the movie.
Open the movie copy in QT Pro and delete the sound track, save.
Open the sound-trackless movie in ffmpegX and use the settings I suggested except disable the audio encode.
Use ffmpegX to demux the resulting mpg, save the m2v track.
Open the original movie in QT pro and export wav.
Open the wav in ffmpegX and select Audio file to AC3.
Import m2v and AC3 to Sizzle or DVDSP.

Which really isn't much different than what I've been doing. Just keep the AAC away from ffmpegX

See;
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=987394
and
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1027095
But neither one of those mentions the movie being written to the memory instead of the HD.