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Converting mass *.avi files to AppleTV

kmaute

kmaute

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 5, 2008
304
3
USA
Hey all,

I have roughly 250 gigs of various avis, primarily television shows that I'd like to convert to an AppleTV watchable format. The quality is less than stellar already but would prefer not to lose anymore. First off, is this even possible? I have a 2.2 SR MBP with 4g of RAM to do this project. However, I'll be buying a Nehalem iMac as soon as they are released. I guess if it takes that long, it'll be a big help. Any advice as to the program of choice (I have VisualHub) would be great. Thank you.
 
Any recommendations as to settings? Is it worth the time to go h.264? Thanks...
 
Visualhub will pwn this project. I converted a few seasons of TV shows for a friend over the past few days and everything worked perfectly. I use H.264 encoding and the highest quality setting.
 
Karpfish said:
Visualhub will pwn this project. I converted a few seasons of TV shows for a friend over the past few days and everything worked perfectly. I use H.264 encoding and the highest quality setting.
Click to expand...

I have the same "problem" but VisualHub isn't available any more. Any thoughts on an alternative?

Cheers

- D
 
I just downloaded VisualHub yesterday so it's around if you know where to look. I suggest googling to see if you can't find it. I'm so tempted to use this as motivation to buy a new MP. I think 8 cores would handle this nicely. Thanks...
 
Something like this?

1) Download HandBrakeCLI Snapshot 3
2) Open Terminal
3) "cd" to directory containing AVIs
4)
for file in *.avi
do
echo "Converting $file..."
/Applications/HandBrakeCLI --decomb --preset "iPod High-Rez" -i "$file" -o "$file.m4v" 2> $file.log
done

Or you could use the HandBrake GUI I guess.
 
If you have that many AVIs I suggest you look into elgato Turbo264, if you don't mind paying a little more for it, since it will help free up your Mac for other important tasks and takes the load off the CPU.

Right now I'm in the process of converting AVIs roughly around your size and turbo.264 has been doing that job for the past 2 days. No worries about the heat issue!!!

so if you have that many files to convert I suggest you look into it.

Happy watching :D
 
janph76 said:
If you have that many AVIs I suggest you look into elgato Turbo264, if you don't mind paying a little more for it, since it will help free up your Mac for other important tasks and takes the load off the CPU.

Right now I'm in the process of converting AVIs roughly around your size and turbo.264 has been doing that job for the past 2 days. No worries about the heat issue!!!

so if you have that many files to convert I suggest you look into it.

Happy watching :D
Click to expand...

If you do decide to use the HandBrakeCLI then I'd suggest you limit it to just using one CPU ( --cpu 1) to avoid heating up your MBP too much - it will take longer, but your Mac will be happier for it.

Cheers, Ed.
 
janph76 said:
If you have that many AVIs I suggest you look into elgato Turbo264, if you don't mind paying a little more for it, since it will help free up your Mac for other important tasks and takes the load off the CPU.

Right now I'm in the process of converting AVIs roughly around your size and turbo.264 has been doing that job for the past 2 days. No worries about the heat issue!!!

so if you have that many files to convert I suggest you look into it.

Happy watching :D
Click to expand...

-1 on this.

The Turbo.264 hardware is pretty good, but the software associated with it is not quite as good. I have never had any problems with Handbrake or Visualhub compared to the video corruption and slow speeds I experienced when using the Turbo.264. You might have better luck, but I returned my Turbo.264 after being very disappointed with it.
 
While VisualHub is my favorite (and has an Apple TV preset), a nice free alternative is MPEG Streamclip. It has support for a seemingly infinite list of formats and full batch capability.
 
eddyg said:
If you do decide to use the HandBrakeCLI then I'd suggest you limit it to just using one CPU ( --cpu 1) to avoid heating up your MBP too much - it will take longer, but your Mac will be happier for it.

Cheers, Ed.
Click to expand...

Hmm...more knowledge for me, thanks for the tip "edd" :)
 
janph76 said:
Hmm...more knowledge for me, thanks for the tip "edd" :)
Click to expand...

This depends on which Mac you have - I have a Mac Pro - and I use all the cores when encoding. However I use smcFanControl to increase the fan speed to avoid overheating, when I didn't do this the memory would get too hot and start getting errors.

In fact now that I use HB for EyeTV encoding I just leave the fans at 950rpm all the time (normally they run at 400rpm). I'm looking forward to the day where smcFanControl can use Activity based settings for the fans, so that it automatically ramps up the base fan speed based on what is running.

Ideally Apple would fix their fan speed vs temperature curves to ramp the fans up earlier - I find that its no where near aggressive enough to keep the Mac Pro cool.

Cheers, Ed.
 
are the h.264?

If your .avis are recent - they may already be encoded with h.264 but just be using the .avi container.

In that case all you need is MPEG Streamclip to change the container to .mp4 which will take seconds not hours.

To check what the actual encoding is, just use quicktime's movie inspector
 
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