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Blazer5913

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 20, 2004
386
14
Hey guys, just a quick question and not looking for any heated debates on which settings are the best/ideal for the iphone. I'm handbraking season 1 of the office for my iphone and was wondering the exact resolution to set it at. Obviously they will be watched sideways (landscape? sorry, haha) so in handbrake I'll just set the horizontal resolution of The Office episode to match the iPhone's, correct? And then with aspect ratio the vertical res. will match it as well. And I'll be setting my bitrate to start off at 1000, and then really just keep trial and erroring myself to see how low/high I need to go to get satisfied with quality vs. size ratio. So all all looking for is the resolution when viewing videos and just let me know if any of this "method" stands out as being wrong. Thanks
 
there doesn't seem to be a majority consensus yet or anything official from the last time I read for the settings.
 
I found that I still get good quality movies at 2 hrs for 350MB, or a total bitrate of 388kbit/s (audio+video).

For an individual episode you could probably get away with 50MB. Its not like it should take a while to encode, try a few different settings and see what you like.
 
there doesn't seem to be a majority consensus yet or anything official from the last time I read for the settings.

I only wanted to know the resolution I should be encoding and listing my method of encoding to see if I am doing anything wrong. A simple YES/NO would've been great.

SIROMEGA, sounds great, I'll give it a try. Have a great day BigPrince you dick
 
Forums are tools used by individuals to help one another, answer questions, gather info and all other sorts of things, sadly being pricks is one of them to. I like to believe though that what goes around, comes around and you'll get yours one day.

Anyways, sorry Blazer, do you have the new version of handbrake that has the presets on the right side? If you do, I find that I liked the ipod preset, and it actually worked out well for viewing on the iPhone. Give that preset a try on an episode to see if you like it, but i'm sure you will. You can tone the bitrate down to 1000 to decrease the file size some if you want, I think the preset is at 1500.

Give it a go.
 
And this preset will set me up with the correct resolution for my DVD's as well? And I was wondering, would you guys include chapter markers on these rips or not?
 
DVDs:
Autocrop
Preset resolution for proper aspect ratio (2.35 for anamorphic - the wide theatrical aspect ratio, 1.78 for widescreen 16:9 media, 1.33 for 4:3 SD TV)
2-pass
chapter markers
160kbit/s audio
fix size of output file to 350MB for 2 hr movie, adjust up or down as time is shorter/longer

Note that I'm using the windows handbrake, but the same settings should apply for the mac.
 
Why not just use the "Convert selection for Ipod" in iTunes? it gives a resolution of 640x360 with a .m4v (MPEG-4 video file). They show great on the iPhone.
 
Why not just use the "Convert selection for Ipod" in iTunes? it gives a resolution of 640x360 with a .m4v (MPEG-4 video file). They show great on the iPhone.

Because you can't use iTunes to convert a DVD to an iPod format.
 
And this preset will set me up with the correct resolution for my DVD's as well? And I was wondering, would you guys include chapter markers on these rips or not?

This is what I do for all my DVDs in Handbrake: The settings work just fine, try it out, it's not the utmost best quality that a 1000 kbps will yield, but it works very well for an iPhone:

use iPod preset

Add Chapter markers
2-pass encoding
Average Bitrate (kbps): 256
Audio and Subtitle: Change Track 1 Mix to Stereo
Sample Rate: 44.1
Bitrate: 128
Subtitles: only if you need them
Change Picture settings to: 480 x aspect ratio

The rest of the settings are default for iPod preset

My file sizes for the following movies, just to give you an idea:
Kill Bill Vol. 1: 306.4 mb
Kill Bill Vol. 2: 379 mb
Ocean's 11: 322.5
Pirates of the Caribbean 1: 396.2 mb
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: 417 mb
Star Wars: Ep. 3: 387.8 mb

It's a very good tradeoff between size and quality. Encoding Ocean's 12 at 1000 kbps, 168 sound quality, 640 x aspect ratio and 48 sample rate produced a 1.2 gig file, obviously the quality was much better, but it's so unnoticeable that it's not worth it. The downside is these movies will only play nicely on your iphone, you will notice a huge quality bust if you try to play it on anything larger.

The only time I ever noticed the lower quality was when there was a dark scene in the movie with low lighting. You might see mild blocks, but it's not too noticeable and doesn't take away from the movie. You are playing it on an iphone after all...
 
This is what I do for all my DVDs in Handbrake: The settings work just fine, try it out, it's not the utmost best quality that a 1000 kbps will yield, but it works very well for an iPhone:

use iPod preset

Add Chapter markers
2-pass encoding
Average Bitrate (kbps): 256
Audio and Subtitle: Change Track 1 Mix to Stereo
Sample Rate: 44.1
Bitrate: 128
Subtitles: only if you need them
Change Picture settings to: 480 x aspect ratio

The rest of the settings are default for iPod preset

My file sizes for the following movies, just to give you an idea:
Kill Bill Vol. 1: 306.4 mb
Kill Bill Vol. 2: 379 mb
Ocean's 11: 322.5
Pirates of the Caribbean 1: 396.2 mb
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: 417 mb
Star Wars: Ep. 3: 387.8 mb

It's a very good tradeoff between size and quality. Encoding Ocean's 12 at 1000 kbps, 168 sound quality, 640 x aspect ratio and 48 sample rate produced a 1.2 gig file, obviously the quality was much better, but it's so unnoticeable that it's not worth it. The downside is these movies will only play nicely on your iphone, you will notice a huge quality bust if you try to play it on anything larger.

The only time I ever noticed the lower quality was when there was a dark scene in the movie with low lighting. You might see mild blocks, but it's not too noticeable and doesn't take away from the movie. You are playing it on an iphone after all...

When I try adding chapter markers and get the mv4 format, it will not let me drag the file into itunes. I can't play it in quick time either. I can however play it in windows media player using the CCC codec pack.

Also whenever I try 2nd pass I get and error message when trying to playback the finished file, something about atom, forgot what the full message was.
 
When I try adding chapter markers and get the mv4 format, it will not let me drag the file into itunes. I can't play it in quick time either. I can however play it in windows media player using the CCC codec pack.

Also whenever I try 2nd pass I get and error message when trying to playback the finished file, something about atom, forgot what the full message was.

The format it should be encoding in is *.mp4, it produces a file for me that plays in Quicktime and imports just fine into iTunes. I'm not entirely sure why it's giving you that problem, maybe you don't have the correct codecs?
 
If you're willing to shell out $24, Visual Hub does a great job and has an iPhone preset (as well as lots of others). I've used this to encode many source formats to many many destination formats and it always works great. Developer is responsive and quick to crush bugs and add features. iPhone preset was added I think the day the iPhone was released.
 
This may be a dumb question, but why would you not change the setting to 320 x aspect ratio?

I have been using a height of 320 for most content that is 4:3 or 16:9. This gives me a clean height when I "tap to zoom in" so that it fills the screen vertically. For casual viewing, I'm not too concerned about the director's intentions and like the larger view.

For widescreen movies (2.35:1), I use a width of 640 since anything higher blows up on the iPhone. I think it ends up being around 204 or something vertically.
 
I have been using a height of 320 for most content that is 4:3 or 16:9. This gives me a clean height when I "tap to zoom in" so that it fills the screen vertically. For casual viewing, I'm not too concerned about the director's intentions and like the larger view.

For widescreen movies (2.35:1), I use a width of 640 since anything higher blows up on the iPhone. I think it ends up being around 204 or something vertically.

The iPhone has a native 480x320 display...don't you find it to be slightly under in terms of quality?

I currently am encoding at 500. 1000 was too much and I don't see the difference on the Phone itself. Originally I was just doing everything for my iTv and iPhone (640xAspect, 1500), but the file sizes started to bug me.

If they allow FULL SD (848x Aspect Ratio), which the iPhone should have the power to playback, then I might trade off space for quality since I then could be happy with it on my iTV and the iPhone all from the same file.
 
I must be sadistic, but i encode at 640x# where # is just the proper aspect ratio to allow the 640 width. I kept the bit rate at 1k and the audio was at 128kb/s 44.1. It turned out pretty darn good but is of course 900meg for a 1.5 hour movie.

I was trying to find a happy medium between itunes/appletv/iphone that would work on all 3 and still look decent.
 
Macbook Pro will not read Pirates 2 DVD

Has anyone else had this problem? I can't get my macbook pro to read the Pirates 2 DVD. Is this some sort of copy protection?

My PC reads the disc fine.
 
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