HandBrake ripping compatibility tests

dynaflash said:

Well, ideally you want to try to get away with it as high as you can. Having said that the higher you go the closer you are getting to hitting the 5g ipods bitrate spike limit. To make matters even more confusing, it will only rear its ugly head on very complex scenes. Some movies might work fine with no vbv settings applied whatsoever. So use a source where you have seen frame drop before so you have a constant. I have a few benchmark movies I use to test. The worse I have seen it Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix. The frame dropping happens right at the beginning during the first chapter. If the iPod doesnt drop frames there, its not likely to and you have found the sweet spot.

I would keep working with the settings that are working well for you for now.

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eddyg said:

Yes - if there is an AC3 audio track then the file extension *must* be m4v otherwise it will be deemed an invalid mp4 file.

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Maury said:

I really dislike this aspect of the ATV. If Apple would simply license Dolby Live you could put in an AAC encoded 5.1 and have it convert to DD 5.1 on the fly. This would mean you could have all the channels, but still have a much smaller file. It would also continue to play just fine on other devices, the only hardware that would need the DL would be the ATV, which is highly likely to be attached to a DD AV system.

Maury

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NightStorm said:

Why would you want to do AC3 -> AAC -> AC3? I'd imagine that would have a pretty negative effect on the audio quality.

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oli2140 said:

Does anybody know what video settings iTunes uses for its TV Shows and Films?

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NightStorm said:

Not really applicable... I'm sure the studios don't simply hand Apple a DVD and tell them to use Handbrake on it.

In short, they start with a much better source.

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oli2140 said:

Does anybody know what video settings iTunes uses for its TV Shows and Films?

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ukor said:

I have been running some tests of this with these settings and I cannot get AC-3 to output when included with AAC. I have installed and configured Perian on my Mac Mini that is toslinked to my Yamaha AVR. I get 6.1 using the Incredibles as a test with just AC-3 Passthrough, but when I add in AAC, I only get Dolby Prologic II in Front Row and QuickTime. Also, VLC complains about not having an AC-3 codec? Why won't it pass it through as it would with the DVD? Also the PCM light is on on the AVR.

Am I doing something wrong or is this as expected?

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eclipse525 said:

Does anyone know the settings for a PS3? I tried a couple of settings in handbrake and it's won't play. Any idea's? Thanks!

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kjr39 said:

I thought I read somewhere else that a limiting factor in the iPod is that it can't handle b-frames?

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cowm007 said:

I don't know how many of you are in the same situation as me, but I have a few Apple devices I'd like to play my media on. I'd also like to have only 1 file that plays across all the platforms and has the best quality/size ratio possible. I've looked online for such a solution but found mixed results so I've decided to run my own tests using the newly released HandBrake version 0.9.2

I'm testing the files on various devices. They are as follows:

• iTunes 7.6
• Apple TV Take 2
• iPhone with 1.1.3 Firmware
• 3g iPod nano with 1.1. Firmware

My hardware is a MacBook with a 2Ghz Core 2 duo and 3GB of RAM. I'm ripping chapter 1 of the "Groundhog Day" widescreen DVD which has 5.1 audio and multiple languages. For quality, I always do 2-pass encoding as it helps immensely with fast scene changes. For benchmark purposes, I get 60fps average on the 1st pass and 19fps average on the 2nd pass at the 1500 kbps bitrate.

Alright here's my results placed into a nice easy to read chart. Basically what I can gather is that the HandBrake team has done a great job in terms of compatibility and that Apple has understated the iPhone/iPod's potential. I'm happy to find that both my iPod and iPhone were able to handle the full sized anamorphic DVD rip with 4 audio tracks (AAC and AC3).

The settings I choose were based off the "iPod High" preset. My rationale for the tested resolutions is based off Apple's published iPhone/iPod specs. http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html According to them, the max resolution the iPhone can handle is 640x480 @ 1500kbps. I found out what this actually means is that the max pixel count the iPhone can handle is 307,200 pixels (640 times 480). So the 720x400 was the highest you can get a widescreen rip (non-anamorphic) and still be under the max pixel count (288,000 px).

Surprisingly though, the iPhone/iPod were able to handle the full resolution 708x466 (329,928 px) without complaints. Since the resolution limit was higher that I expected, I decided to test other bit-rates as well. I tried both 2500 and then 5000kbps. The results are as follows.

Important note: You HAVE to choose the iPod/iPhone preset first and crank up the setting from there if you want to get these high quality cross-device files. If you choose the Apple TV preset and go from there they won't work. I'm guessing it's got something to do with the advanced flags. Also, it didn't matter if I checked the "iPod Atom" flag or not. I'm not sure anymore what it's for, maybe some older iPods require it but I don't have any to test with.

Here's the results:

Extrapolating the data, the average sizes for a 90 minute movie file should be as follows:

• All@1500kbps, 2x AAC: 1,188 MB
• All@1500kbps, 1x AAC, 1x AC3: 1,360 MB
• All@1500kbps, 2x AAC, 2x AC3: 1,620 MB
• Anamorphic @ 2500: 2,340 MB
• Anamorphic @ 5000: 4,000 MB

OK so conclusions. Looks like the devices can handle much more than I thought they could. I've done tests before and it used to be I couldn't get the anamorphic or the higher bitrate files to play on my iPhone. So it looks like I can start upping the quality of my rips and not worry about compatibility. On the downside, my previous rips now feel old and outdated lol.

The settings I'll probably use on movies from now on are the Anamorphic Strict setting for the highest resolution possible and 2500kbps video. I did always feel 1500 was lacking clarity on the Apple TV so it's nice to be able to increase that. 5000kbps seems like over kill to me since I can't really notice a difference between that and 2500kbps. It's also pushing the 4GB file limit people seem to run into trouble with. I'll leave the 5000+AC3 for my HD rips, those can really benefit from it.

Still not sure about audio since it only benefits the Apple TV. The size jump is also quite high for the high quality AC3 tracks. I'd rather have 2 different languages than the 5.1 surround sound with the added size penalty. But that's just personal choice.

The results are not conclusive as I have yet to try a full screen DVD and one of those ultra widescreen DVDs, but given the iPhone/iPod outperformed, I think I'll find similar results with those.

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oleus23@aol.com said:

this may be related to ukor's problem :

on my first few handbrake test encodes, i was able to get DD 5.1 audio just fine with some dvd content via Apple TV. Recently however i've been noticing that even if i use the AAC+AC3 Audio setting (like i did with the first few successful 5.1 encodes) I am only getting Prologic on the handbrake encodes when I watch on my Apple TV. Occasionally it seems to give me the 5.1 on an encode but only 1 out of my last 10 encodes (all of which had 5.1 audio tracks selected and the AC3 selected in handbrake output "track 1 mix").

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Cave Man said:

HB does transcoding from VOB files. But that might be changing, right Dyna?

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benjsh said:

What is the best way to adjust it so it works on iPhone but still has the best quality?
So I guest I need to use the Apple TV profile and make a few adjustments so the quality only goes a little down but then works on the iPhone?

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