Reversing Optimization of MP4 Container

[ItsTheSource]

Hey all,

I've got 665 movies that have been encoded & optimized using handbrake. However, there is a bug in plex that will not allow me to play these videos on the ATV2. I've confirmed that the problem only exists when the container has been optimized and I'm looking for a way to reverse it without re-encoding all of my 665 movies.

As I understand it, the moov atom must be listed before the mdat atom in order for an MP4 container to be optimized. However, I don't think that is all that's being done. I found a movie in an unoptimized MP4 container and created a new optimized file using mp4creator's optimize flag. I compared the file sizes and they're slightly different. I opened the movie with an unoptimized MP4 container in a hex editor and found 87 bytes that were associated with the free atom, but the files differed by 266 bytes.

So does anyone know what gives here? Does anyone have know of any resources that can point me in the right direction?

[Baldrick]

Have you asked or searched the plex forum? http://forums.plexapp.com/ especially http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/39265-my-solution-for-all-apple-devices/page__st__40

I would wait for a plex update/fix.

[ItsTheSource]

Yea, I've been over it with them. They've created a bug for the problem, but I'm impatient .

Rather than try to resolve the differences between the optimized and unoptimized videos, I've found that I can extract the video & audio streams using ffmpeg & place them in a new container. That seems to do the trick but I'm of course having problems automating the process.

Err...as a side effect it seems I lose some metadata for the individual streams in the process.