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Convert mkv movies into mp4

jjmancini said:
This in my opinion, makes the 360 better than the apple TV. If you really want to be able to send mkv's to your TV, I would recommend the Xbox 360.

We were able to do it here:
http://www.vanillahd.com/index.php/tutorial-play-any-video-file-on-your-xbox-360-with-your-mac/
Click to expand...
I read the tutorial and I don't see what the advantage is. You have to re-encode for TV and you have to re-encode for the XBox360, what's the advantage?

As long as I'm re-encoding I may as well play back the mp4s on my TV because:

  1. It's quieter.
  2. It's quicker and easier to use.
  3. I don't need to buy Connect360.

Or am I missing something?
 
macphin said:
macshodan, could you please describe how to change high level 5.1 to 4.1 in hex editor. Thanks
Click to expand...

Well simply extract the video track using mkvextract, then open it with your hex editor, I like to use Hex Fiend. You should locate the string (it's at the very beginning of the file) 0167640033, and simply change the las t 2 digits, 33 into 29. Save the file and you have tricked it to level 4.1

Note that this hack only works with PS3, not with Apple TV or Xbox360.
 
stomer said:
I read the tutorial and I don't see what the advantage is. You have to re-encode for TV and you have to re-encode for the XBox360, what's the advantage?

As long as I'm re-encoding I may as well play back the mp4s on my TV because:

  1. It's quieter.
  2. It's quicker and easier to use.
  3. I don't need to buy Connect360.

Or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Well, because you can do true 1080p, I think that is a huge plus!
 
jjmancini said:
Well, because you can do true 1080p, I think that is a huge plus!
Click to expand...

Mmmm I had the X360 before the PS3, and I noticed that the horsepower of PS3 in decoding H264 is far superior than X360. I had many movies with scenes that goes over 12 Mbit/sec and the 360 was choppy while decoding those scenes, on the PS3 the same movie is smooth. On the other hand, you can't play High Level Profile 5.1 video files on the 360 while you can on the PS3 simply tricking it is 4.1. To me the PS3 is the winner in these area, and it's quieter too! ;)
 
jjmancini said:
Well, because you can do true 1080p, I think that is a huge plus!
Click to expand...
Well, if you have a 1080p TV and you have 1080p content (not see much of that about), then yeah I can see why you might want to watch stuff on an Xbox.
Out of curiosity, how noisy does the Xbox get with 1080p content?
 
In my opinion, the Xbox 360 is not that loud. Once a movie gets pumping, I don't hear it. It is white noise. But the 360 sits out in the open (Well ventilated) about 10 feet away.

I have no problems with the fan noise. Now the drive noise is another problem. that does bug me sometimes.
 
I'm kind of shocked at how useless Apple's video implementation really is, considering its lack of standard support for even H.264, much less going the extra mile for higher bitrates, subtitles, or MKVs.

I hope this is just a short-sighted thing that will be fixed with improved hardware over the next couple of years. Unfortunately, there's no incentive for improvement as Apple can't have 4 different versions (iPod/iPhone, Apple TV, Apple TV HD, "Apple TV 3" as I am thinking of it) of every movie on iTunes anyway.

I suppose they could at least fix subtitles though, especially after it was so trumpeted that they had "support" for them.
 
refulgentis said:
I'm kind of shocked at how useless Apple's video implementation really is, considering its lack of standard support for even H.264, much less going the extra mile for higher bitrates, subtitles, or MKVs.

I hope this is just a short-sighted thing that will be fixed with improved hardware over the next couple of years. Unfortunately, there's no incentive for improvement as Apple can't have 4 different versions (iPod/iPhone, Apple TV, Apple TV HD, "Apple TV 3" as I am thinking of it) of every movie on iTunes anyway.

I suppose they could at least fix subtitles though, especially after it was so trumpeted that they had "support" for them.
Click to expand...

apple has great support for h264 :s, i think this thread needs to get back to mkv converting rather than appletv vs ps3 etc, there are other threads open discussing this already.

anyone noticed a bug in new visual hub converting mkz where the time line jumps between a normal time remaining to a crazy long time?
 
speakerwizard said:
apple has great support for h264 :s, i think this thread needs to get back to mkv converting rather than appletv vs ps3 etc, there are other threads open discussing this already.

anyone noticed a bug in new visual hub converting mkz where the time line jumps between a normal time remaining to a crazy long time?
Click to expand...
yeah, not sure why. i wish i understood more how that program worked, but from my basic investigation it looks like its a gui tying together a bunch of applescripts that command a custom build of ffmpegx that was all created by a guy who is very intelligent about video formats and how they work on apple software.

i tried rolling my own build of ffmpeg to take advantage of some recent improvements in x264, and then replaced it in the visualhub support directory, and the progress bar is completely broken, yet conversions happen fine. so i guess the progress bar has something to do with his build of ffmpeg.
 
I think there's something people aren't understanding about these MKV files they're trying to convert in quicktime pro. You can ONLY "pass through" video if the MKV contains ONLY an mp4 video track and aac/ac3 audio track.

Use MKVMerge to remove the subtitles and extra audio tracks. You will have one audio and one video left. Remux that back to an mkv (you do not have to split these files and remux them separately...if you open an mkv file in MKVMerge and just uncheck the extra tracks you can remux right there and it will recreate the mkv as a quicktime pro compatible file).

You can now open it in Quicktime Pro and use the passthrough video option. This does, however, reconvert your nice DTS or dolby tracks into standard aac stereo. I have not found anything that successfully creates an mp4 file, keeping the ac3 and video tracks in tact.
 
however, on large files i've gotten a non-64-bit-compliant file from quicktime that i have to run through visual hub with both the audio and video set to "passthrough" for it to repackage as a 64-bit compliant 4GB+ file. It only takes about 4min on here ("here" being just a 2.4ghz c2d macbook pro with a 7200rpm drive and 4gb, but any ol core2 laptop should do this in well under 10minutes too..it's not super intensive...it's just rewriting the file...probably the harddrive is the biggest bottleneck cuz it's super quick on my 8core raid machine)
 
NeverEnuf81 said:
Use MKVMerge to remove the subtitles and extra audio tracks. You will have one audio and one video left. Remux that back to an mkv (you do not have to split these files and remux them separately...if you open an mkv file in MKVMerge and just uncheck the extra tracks you can remux right there and it will recreate the mkv as a quicktime pro compatible file).
Click to expand...

How do you uncheck extra tracks in MKVMerge considering it's a CLI app? Do you have access to a GUI wrapper from MKVMerge?
 
gnkieffer said:
I found a very simple way to convert MKV to MP4 without using command line tools and with no re-encoding of the video stream, no quality lost. It requires Quicktime Pro and Perian. I wrote a quick tutorial with screen shots on my blog.
You only need to export the movie using Quicktime and yesssss, there is a Pass Through option for the video :D Quicktime always surprises me :apple:
Click to expand...

Hi gnkieffer,
I would like to read your tutorial but the link doesn't seem to be working anymore. :confused: Any chance you can post it again or send it to me?
Thanks, I would appreciate it!
 
I've got some mkv videos with subs. How I got the video to play on my :apple:tv was to use QT Pro with Perian insatalled and VisualHub.

1. Open up mkv file using QT Pro.
2. In QT, File > Save As > Save as self-contained movie. (video now saved as .mov)
3. Drop the .mov file into VisualHub and encode it using AppleTV profile (optimized for AppleTV)

The .mp4 file contains subs and plays on my :apple:tv perfectly and I don't see any degrade in video quality between the .mkv and .mp4 file. However, the file size tripled.
 
Converting or burning an .mkv

Okay, just to add my two cents, I find that to burn or convert an mkv file you need to download two free software's. First is a software called Burn here.

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net

Next you will need a conversion program called "ffmepgX" You can find it here:

http://ffmpegX.com

Install both programs onto your Mac. You will have to get some additional files for the ffmepgX program but they tell you where to get them.

Now open the ffmepgX program and drag the mkv file to where it says "Drop Here", under the summary tab. In the window to the right it will come up with a suggested conversion. Click and hold on that window and change it to "DVD mpeg2enc.

Now if there are subtitles that you want to be included, Click on the filters tab, and click on the VOB box. You will need to know what channel the subtitles are on, Usually on channel 2, so click where it says 0 and change it to the channel that the mkv has the subtitles on.

Leave the next box on "Burn" and it will burn the subtitles into the movie.

You can change or alter almost anything in the movie with this program but this will get you started. Click "ENCODE" and wait for it to convert.

After conversion, you may have many files, but the one your interested in is the "ff.mpg" file. This file will usually not open with Quicktime. You can open and view it with VLC if you want.

Now that the ff.mpg file has the subtitles burned into it you can convert it to any file format you want by using the ffmepgX conversion program. Or you can simply burn a disk with the movie and watch it as a dvd. To Burn a disk, drop the "ff.mpg" file into the BURN program after you click the tab for video and DVD. It will tell you that it is not a compatible file and ask if you wish to convert it. Say yes and follow the instructions till it burns on a disk.

This has worked many times for me. Let me know if you have any problems.
 
@padale: nice post, but the problem here is that you're converting (encoding) a possibly HD movie into a SD dvd file, so you'll loose most of the quality. The process you described is useful if you want to watch an HD Mkv video file into a standard dvd player, what we're trying to achieve here is to take a HD quality file contained into an mkv and change it's container without loosing quality, aka without re-encoding it.

Anyway, nice tutorial if someone wants to play hd movie with sd players.
 
macshodan said:
@padale: nice post, but the problem here is that you're converting (encoding) a possibly HD movie into a SD dvd file, so you'll loose most of the quality. The process you described is useful if you want to watch an HD Mkv video file into a standard dvd player, what we're trying to achieve here is to take a HD quality file contained into an mkv and change it's container without loosing quality, aka without re-encoding it.

Anyway, nice tutorial if someone wants to play hd movie with sd players.
Click to expand...

MKV2Vob is what you want which I and someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, It muxes everything (Subtitles, Other audio etc etc) into a Vob container so you can burn to DVD
 
northy124 said:
MKV2Vob is what you want which I and someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, It muxes everything (Subtitles, Other audio etc etc) into a Vob container so you can burn to DVD
Click to expand...

Yep I know, but there's only 1 problem, it works on windows... ;)
I'd like to have a solution that don't involve the installation of VmWare and Windows Xp... :D
 
I use it too sometimes, but visualhub re-encode the movie, while solutions like mkv2vob just change the container, so you want loose any quality and the process took about 5-10 minutes, instead of 3-4 hours! :D
 
Hrm...can you convert to vob then convert the vob with handbrake for appletv format and still keep the 5.1 and good quality?

Now I'm curious if that will work haha
 
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