Ok, I downloaded the Hardbrake software yesterday, and it took almost 3 hours to rip a movie... is that how it's supposed to be done? or do i rip it through Mac the Ripper first and THEN convert it to an mp4 on this program? I'm very confused, please help! Thanks!
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Hardbrake Software
- Thread starter abereagle77
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Encoding time depends on file format, bitrate, and length of film.
Oh, and if you don't rip it prior to encoding, speed of ODD.
Oh, and if you don't rip it prior to encoding, speed of ODD.
Is there more of a detailed explaination on how it should work? And is it normal for it to take that long? I'll have to futz with it some more, but i'd like to put some movies on my Apple TV so I don't have to buy them again
There are more than many threads about the proper procedure in this forum alone. Use MRoogle for finding them.
The basic outline of getting your DVDs onto the Apple TV is:
1. Rip the DVD to your HDD (internal or external) with the help of MacTheRipper or some other software. Ripping to the HDD will improve encoding times, as reading from an HDD is much faster than from an optical medium. And the bottleneck is most of the times the read/write speed.
2. Use Handbrake to load that ripped version and then convert it via the Apple TV preset to an .mp4 file.
3. Get the .mp4 file to your Apple TV.
PS: The Apple TV preset must not be the best option, so have a look in older threads touching the same topic.
The basic outline of getting your DVDs onto the Apple TV is:
1. Rip the DVD to your HDD (internal or external) with the help of MacTheRipper or some other software. Ripping to the HDD will improve encoding times, as reading from an HDD is much faster than from an optical medium. And the bottleneck is most of the times the read/write speed.
2. Use Handbrake to load that ripped version and then convert it via the Apple TV preset to an .mp4 file.
3. Get the .mp4 file to your Apple TV.
PS: The Apple TV preset must not be the best option, so have a look in older threads touching the same topic.
Thanks much you guys! I'll test it out when I get home and see how that works out. If not, i'll post back. Thanks again!
You need to share more information to get a good answer. What computer are you using and/or processor and processor speed? On a G4, I've seen movie encodes take 1X hours to complete. Newer, faster machines get the job done a lot faster, but a "couple of hours" tends to be a good general rule.
It looks like you are encoding for
TV. Are you using the TV preset in Handbrake? Are you customizing any settings? For example, 2 pass vs. 1 pass can make a big difference in encoding times too.Are you ripping it first to your hard drive (faster) and then using that file for Handbrake, or trying to encode it via Handbrake directly from the DVD (slower)?
I just did an encode-from-DVD for the first time this weekend (after more than 200 MacTheRipper rips). I was surprised that the encoding time on my Mac Pro reading from the disk was almost the same as that of reading from the hard drive. Nonetheless, I'll still probably rip to hard drive first no matter what. When things don't go as planned, it's easier to deal with files on the hard drive than a disk in the drive.
James
You need to share more information to get a good answer. What computer are you using and/or processor and processor speed? On a G4, I've seen movie encodes take 1X hours to complete. Newer, faster machines get the job done a lot faster, but a "couple of hours" tends to be a good general rule.
It looks like you are encoding for
Are you ripping it first to your hard drive (faster) and then using that file for Handbrake, or trying to encode it via Handbrake directly from the DVD (slower)?
I sure can. Thanks for the time. I'm using a MacBookPro, not sure of the speed, but it's only 1 year old. I tried ripping a movie directly from Hardbrake. I didn't know what the 2 or 1 pass means.. this is new to me, so I'm just trying to figure it out. But I'll try to RIP it first with Mac The Ripper and then converting it on there... And I didn't see any options for encoding it for apple TV in the presets cause I didn't know where to find that in the program. Thanks!
And ruin the quality in the process if you skip out on both passes. Use turbo first pass to save time.
Sometimes I like to let it rip from the DVD while it's encoding because it keeps the processes down and thus the temps. My MBP is usually around 170 deg F during an encode from a file. It still rips/encodes a DVD in about an hour and a half.
A 2-pass encode means, that during the first pass the movie gets analyzed for sudden changes in the image content and such, and in the second pass the accumulated information gets passed down into the actual encoding, so that when fast movements occur no pixel artifacts will be visible.
I encoded about 100 DVDs on a macpro with most taking just under 40 minutes, whereas ripping them from MTR took an hour on top of the 40 min encode time. When I'm working on my mini, I rip to the hard drive then encode.
handbrake normally takes around 2 hours to rip for me. Pretty much the faster the CPU, the faster the rip. I have tried ripping DVDs with handbrake on my old intel pentium4 2.8GHz desktop and it takes twice as long as my uMB. I have noticed that mp4 encoding takes much less time than m4v because it doesn't use a double pass setup. I have also noticed that the m4v format outputs higher quality videos, so if you want a higher quality video, use the two pass setup. I believe you can also use a two pass setup with mp4 but it is not enabled by default. You can only put mp4 files on your iphone/ipod so if that is what you are using handbrake for, use the mp4 format.
Advice
My advice for non Mac Pro's
If you are going to rip with an internal superdrive, rip the DVD first to the hard drive with MacTheRipper, Ripit, or Fairmount/DTOX.
The slot loading superdrives are expensive and a pain to replace.
It is much better to only have the superdrive spinning the disc in the drive for the 15-40 minute DVD rip rather than a 3 hour handbrake conversion from DVD disc. It just puts alot of wear and tear on the superdrive.
I recommend getting a cheap ~ $30-$50 external DVD drive, which will rip DVDs even faster than a 8x riplock superdrive.
My advice for non Mac Pro's
If you are going to rip with an internal superdrive, rip the DVD first to the hard drive with MacTheRipper, Ripit, or Fairmount/DTOX.
The slot loading superdrives are expensive and a pain to replace.
It is much better to only have the superdrive spinning the disc in the drive for the 15-40 minute DVD rip rather than a 3 hour handbrake conversion from DVD disc. It just puts alot of wear and tear on the superdrive.
I recommend getting a cheap ~ $30-$50 external DVD drive, which will rip DVDs even faster than a 8x riplock superdrive.
Has anyone ever tried VisualHub? I think it does a slightly quicker job of encoding than handbrake does.
First: The presets are in the drawer to the right on the handbrake gui. there are several "categories" in blue with disclosure triangles to the left of them. One is "Apple" click on the disclosure triangle and a bunch of presets will drop down. That is where you will see the one for AppleTV.
Second: .mp4 and .m4v are one and the same, one does not allow for 2 pass vs. 1 pass at all. The AppleTV preset uses Constant Quality encoding and there is no ability to run two passes. There is more importantly no need to run two passes. It will maintain the proper bitrate to achieve a given quality level.
Third: Leave the mp4 extension as ".m4v" if you want your appleTV to recognize chapter markers and AC3 sound in an mp4 file. There is no downside to this.
Four: Everything regarding speed of encoding is correct in terms of how long it takes, vs. processor speed. Ram has very little effect as HB had about a 140 mb ram footprint.
Five: On an mbp, three hours to encode a feature length film is not unreasonable at all (obviously the length of the source movie has everything to do with it) using the AppleTV preset. Video encoding is one of the most processor intense tasks you can do with a computer. A couple of popular mac benchmarking sites have started using HandBrake to benchmark speeds of cpu's.
Six: Using the ffmpeg encoder is *much* faster as was said, with much poorer quality.
Seven: Law of video encoding - Quality, Speed, File Size ... pick two.
Second: .mp4 and .m4v are one and the same, one does not allow for 2 pass vs. 1 pass at all. The AppleTV preset uses Constant Quality encoding and there is no ability to run two passes. There is more importantly no need to run two passes. It will maintain the proper bitrate to achieve a given quality level.
Third: Leave the mp4 extension as ".m4v" if you want your appleTV to recognize chapter markers and AC3 sound in an mp4 file. There is no downside to this.
Four: Everything regarding speed of encoding is correct in terms of how long it takes, vs. processor speed. Ram has very little effect as HB had about a 140 mb ram footprint.
Five: On an mbp, three hours to encode a feature length film is not unreasonable at all (obviously the length of the source movie has everything to do with it) using the AppleTV preset. Video encoding is one of the most processor intense tasks you can do with a computer. A couple of popular mac benchmarking sites have started using HandBrake to benchmark speeds of cpu's.
Six: Using the ffmpeg encoder is *much* faster as was said, with much poorer quality.
Seven: Law of video encoding - Quality, Speed, File Size ... pick two.
I just did a movie right from the SuperDrive using HandBrake using the Apple TV setting and it took 6 hours.
It was a 2.5 hour movie no less and I was running it on the last gen PowerMac G5 with a Dual Core 2GHz chip and 3GB RAM.
I've found that on my system it is about 3x the length of the movie when I rip this way but I totally agree with the MTR route first though, as long as MTR doesn't give you any errors in the rip.
It was a 2.5 hour movie no less and I was running it on the last gen PowerMac G5 with a Dual Core 2GHz chip and 3GB RAM.
I've found that on my system it is about 3x the length of the movie when I rip this way but I totally agree with the MTR route first though, as long as MTR doesn't give you any errors in the rip.
Coming from someone for who all of this was also new just a couple of weeks ago, this is great advice for us newbies.
Let me add a few suggestions that we're helpful for me.
I started using the Apple TV preset as well but wasn't ecstatic about the quality so I bumped the Constant Quality level up to 63% (from Apple TV preset of 59%). It added a bit to overall encoding time--play with this to determine what works for you but generally be advised it increasing this will add significantly to encode times and generally, quality improvements higher than this range are negligible to the naked eye but YMMV.
I also discovered both through trial and error and these wonderful forums that video using the Apple TV preset will not play on the iPhone (I believe it has to do with the audio presets) so if you want a file that will play on both the Apple TV and iPhone, start with the Apple Universal preset and then adjust from there to your liking.
As in this thread, I see lots of recommendations for 2 pass encoding--I did it for my first movie, took a long time. I compared to my current settings (one pass) and couldn't notice a difference so I don't both but again, I'm no expert/videophile so try out a chapter of a movie with lots of fast moving action and compare yourself.
And FWIW, I first rip using RipIT (takes about 30-45 minutes) and then encode using Handbrake, which at my settings on my Macbook (about a year old), takes 3-5 hours, depending on the movie.
Finally, after encoding I use MetaX to tag the movie with all pertenant info--very nice for Apple TV (cover art, descriptions, actors, chapter names, etc) and send the file to my iTunes library. You can download MetaX at the Apple website--just do a search for it.
Hope some of this helps.
There is a slideout draw on the right side of the handbrake window. This is where all the preset decodes are. Once you slide open that draw you will see the pesets for all the Apple formats (iPod, iPod Touch, Apple TV, etc, etc).
I was new at this myself a few weeks ago. The presets really help a beginner like me. I use ripit and then handbrake.
Not the audio, audio for the atv and universal preset is the same. Its the bframes used in the advanced panel which allows for greater compression at a higher quality level, fwiw.