HB Apple TV Question

[MikaelSmoot]

My brother rips are blu-rays into mkvs so i took his mkvs and drop them into handbrake on my macbook

the apple tv preset downsizes them to 960 x 544

i read this will happen if u have over 24 fps on your framrate

but my quicktime movie inspector says its at 24 fps

does anyone know why it still does it as 960 x 544

 

[Cave Man]

After selecting the Apple TV preset, click on the Picture button/icon and up it to 1280 wide, then choose 23.xxx or 24 fps from the pull-down. Check your audio tab to make sure you're not getting two DPLII tracks from DTS if the MKV has DTS in it. Otherwise, hope for AC3 to AAC for track 1 and AC3 passthrough for track 2. You should be good to go for the ATV.

 

[dynaflash]

does anyone know why it still does it as 960 x 544

I have a pretty decent idea . Its because HandBrake uses Same as source variable frame rate for that preset. Which means in a nutshell there is no way to guarantee the final bitrate of the source until the encode is done. The source material *may* announce the bitrate upon scan but not always. As well when it does it is often wrong. So, HB uses the least common denominator in favor of increased compatibility, which is to set the resolution to the limit of the highest fps (29.976) that the atv can play.

Now, as Cave Man so astutely points out, if you know your source is 24 - 25 fps, then just manually up the resolution to 720p.