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Maury

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 25, 2008
458
26
I know there are re-coders for other platforms, like MKV2VOB, that will open an MKV and copy it's components into another container without re-coding everything. Is there something similar for the Mac?
 
I have a question about this too. The MKV I'm starting with (720p) is about 5.9 GB in size. Handbrake's AppleTV preset wants to do constant quality of 59%. I'm not a fan of losing 40% quality on this thing, but is that the best way to go? Would I end up with an enormous, unplayable file if I did 100%?

Thanks.
 
Setting the quality to 100% is not going to do anything but give you a bloated file size. The presets in handbrake have been designed to give you output that matches the quality of the input or nearly imperceptable, you might want to play around with the cq setting, but only changing it a couple of percentage points. Take a look at some of the posts on the handbrake forums for a better explanation of the constant quality percentage.
 
If you have the newest VLC on your computer, Handbrake is fantastic at taking nearly anything playable on your Mac and converting it to your choice of codecs.

I usually set mine to encode with a size limit. 100MB for 1/2 hour and 500-700MB for movies depending on length works great.
 
If you have the newest VLC on your computer, Handbrake is fantastic at taking nearly anything playable on your Mac and converting it to your choice of codecs..

Yeah, but 9 times out of 10 all I want to do is convert the perfectly playable content inside a MKV into a M4V so I can sync to my ATV. In that case there's no need to re-encode, all you have to do is copy the content from one container to the other. There's zero loss of quality that way too.

I have noticed that QT complains if there's only a AC-3 inside. Oddly, iTunes plays it fine.

Maury
 
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