vob -> h264 encoding trouble (no audio)

[iamski]

Hi,

I have three movies which I am trying to encode to my ipod that I have decoded to a single vob (as described by the 640w guide). This method has worked great for me, aside from three movies, which result in a good movie output, but it has no audio.

I've noticed before that when encoding with ffmpegx that it lists the audio streams along with the video streams, but it does not with these three (all animated: Cars, Madagascar, The Incredibles) ... am I missing something here?

I've tried changing the audio track setting, and nothing seems to work. I've tried decoding with quicktime and not (it is *much* more reliable for me to deselect that when first encoding; leaving it on usually results in a movie thats ~100M or so) ... any help would be appreciated

[iamski]

I forgot to mention that the vobs all play fine in VLC/Mplayer (with audio).

[rumplestiltskin]

Try transcoding to an intermediate format first; DivX, for example. Then transcode that to one of the iPod H264 formats.

[iamski]

Try transcoding to an intermediate format first; DivX, for example. Then transcode that to one of the iPod H264 formats.

i'll give that a try .. any idea why only some movies seem to hide their audio (or at least it seems hidden from ffmpeg/x264)?

[rumplestiltskin]

As I understand it, encoding to iPod H264 requires QuickTime to do the decoding. Unless QuickTime Player can play the source file perfectly, the underlying QT architecture will be unable to do the decoding when called by ffmpegX.

I always run every video I intend to transcode to iPod H264 through QT Player first. If it has trouble, I know ffmpegX will also have trouble. This is why the intermediate transcode is often necessary.

Don't forget about DivX Doctor II as a good tool to "doctor" AVIs that have goofy, compressed audio. You'll end up with a new .mov file that, while considerably larger, may be dropped into ffmpegX for the iPod H264 transcoding directly.

Let us know how it goes.