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iFlicks - DVD rips without H.264 compression??

B

bp1000

macrumors 65832
Original poster
Jul 7, 2011
1,504
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I've been ripping a lot of my old home movies and some dvds recently, compatible for apple tv 2.

I'm willing to see it through, the quality is great but i have been thinking if it is possible to rip without the time consuming compression H.264 codec to create an m4v file.

I read a thread suggesting that iFlicks is a program that can import MKV videos into iTunes, put them into a m4v wrapper and convert the audio to ensure Apple tv compatibility.

Has anyone tried this?

MKV are much quicker to create from DVD's and space isn't an issue for me.

Would this work?
 
Video DVDs use MPEG-2 as compression, which is very old and also less efficient than MPEG-4 (H.264 is an MPEG-4 variant).
The Apple TV also does not support MPEG-2, thus you need to have a H.264 transcoded file.
Be it via MakeMKV, which is creating a H.264 encoded .mkv file or HandBrake.
 
Or if there are any free alternatives that can remux in minutes rather than 50mins for a re-encode.

Thanks!
 
After some playing, here is my analysis

Makemkv was slow to open the disc, overall it took about 40mins to create the mkv files

To make it worse, it failed the first time, "could no open disc"

Once it made the mkv files, ffmpeg and mkvtools v2.x and v3 beta, neither of these 3 programs could read the mkv file, they were classed as unrecognised.


So i loaded up handbrake, i switched it to rip to mkv, it ripped a TV episode in less than 5 mins and i used subler to re-mux to m4v complete with artwork in less than a minute. The resulting tv episode was about 450Mb and works in quicktime (haven't tried it on apple tv 2 yet), but it's m4v and H.264 video.


Comparing that re-muxed file to my H.264 compressed rips, the file size isn't hugely different but the time taken is massively reduced.

Why is this, is the quality suffering? Why don't more people rip to mkv and then re-mux, it is so much quicker!
 
bp1000 said:
Why is this, is the quality suffering? Why don't more people rip to mkv and then re-mux, it is so much quicker!
Click to expand...

I just transcoded (ripping is something else) an .avi file (8 minutes long, SD resolution) to an .m4v and an .mkv file via HandBrake using the Universal preset.
The transcoding took five minutes both times on my 2007 C2D 2 GHz iMac.
 
iFlicks, like iVI, can do pass-thru on the video IF it is already H.264. This will much, much faster because no transcoding is done.

You seem to be misunderstanding a container and its contents. MKV is just a container, like MP4 or M4V - it CAN contain H.264 video. It might also have MPEG-2 video (like from a DVD rip) in which case the pass-thru WILL NOT WORK as that MPEG-2 video MUST be transcoded to H.264 for Apple TV.
 
Thank you for the advise

It did work on Apple TV as expected, and i hadn't understood that MKV was a container for H.264 video anyway.

I see no reason not to just do this method from now on, it seems so much quicker. MKV -> Re-mux to m4v.

I have to run it through subler anyway to get the artwork
 
Last edited:
I actually realised that the speed increases in ripping came from using the Regular -> Normal profile in handbrake and switching it to MKV.

It's nothing to do with MKV ripping faster, it was the fact that i changed the preset.

After experimentation, i also realised that the apple TV 2 preset has custom picture cropping which doubles (or more) the time it takes to product the m4v video.

So now i've ended up with a preset which was started from the normal profile which doesn't have picture cropping, but i've added in anamorphic loose, large file, set the RF to 20, changed the FPS to PAL (as i'm in the UK) and added a second audio AAC pass through like the apple tv preset.

Now my rips are 3 - 4x faster but they still work on apple tv.

There are some options in the advanced tab that are different, like trellis, reference frames, 8x8 transform and sub pixel ME... i have no idea what these are, but my resulting rips still look good...
 
I just need to figure out what subme and subq are and how they affect pq as they greatly increase encoding time.

This is called subpixel me / motion option in advanced tab
 
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