Converting random video files for AppleTV
In lieu of hacking our shiny new AppleTV for the moment I’ve been playing around with ways to convert Random Video Files to something it’ll happily digest. I have the basic process down for taking xvid+subrip and turning it into something iTunes will treat as an episode of a TV show and am now running the single-file-encode script one last time to make sure the automation is all set.
The basic gist of it is that you use mencoder (on Win32 in my case) to encode the audio (FAAC) and video (x264) seperately to raw streams, then use MP4Box so mux them, and finally AtomicParsley to set the appropriate metadata bits to make iTunes and AppleTV happy.
This results in the files Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.avi and Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.srt turning into Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.mp4 and appearing as Farscape season 3 episode 1 in iTunes/AppleTV.
At present I’m simply burning the subtitles into the video as we only ever watch stuff with subtitles on anyway. I’ve experimented with MP4Box’s .srt->TTXT conversion but it results in very jittery playback. Not sure what’s up with that, it isn’t just the specific subtitle files I’m using as I also let SubRip do an OCR from DVD and the result still wouldn’t work.
I will do the hack anyway, but suspect that once I’ve got this basic script plus a wrapper (so it’ll do a big batch job) I’ll probably keep on doing this for things we’ll want to hang on to — it’s nice having everything sorted by show-name/etc and if ever the hack “breaks” we’re not left up that creek without that paddle.
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