Getting Chapters in Handbrake???

[FleurDuMal]

Hey. I'm currently ripping a few of my DVD's onto my computer using MacTheRipper and encoding them with Handbrake. However, I never seem to get chapters. How would I go about getting them? I encoding using h.264 into MP4.

Also, can someone explain to me the difference between "x.264 (baseline)" and "x.264 (main profile)". Thanks!

 

[FleurDuMal]

Bumpety bump bump....

 

[comictimes]

Don't know too much about this stuff, so don't take me entirely at my word, but handbrake simply takes a dvd and converts it into a regular video file. Since chapters are something specific to a dvd and the "video_ts" folder, they wouldn't be preserved.

That was really confusing... basically I'm just saying that you can't have a regular video file have chapters, those are only in dvd's.

 

[andcraig]

I'm not sure if the mp4 container can support chapters.

You can get chapters, multiple soft-subbed subtitle tracks, multiple audio tracks, etc in an advanced container like matroska however.
Handbrake won't do that though, can't think of any OSX app that will.

But yeah, there might be a way to do it in ffmpegx?

 

[Yuvi]

I'm not sure if the mp4 container can support chapters.

Chapters in MP4 are officially supposed to be done using some advanced features, but almost nothing supports that, and instead are typically stored in the user data, which was started by Nero.

You can get chapters, multiple soft-subbed subtitle tracks, multiple audio tracks, etc in an advanced container like matroska however.
Handbrake won't do that though, can't think of any OSX app that will.

Yeah, I doubt anything in OS X can do that yet. Hmm... if something could just get the chapter timecodes, you could easily mux them with whatever Handbrake produced into a Matroska file via mkvmerge.. I wonder how hard it would be to use libdvdread to do this...

 

[projectle]

Sorry to completely contradict absolutely everything that you all just said, but Chapters work perfectly in an MP4 Video File.

All you need to do is use Handbrake to convert the DVD to your output format, then open the final file in Metadata Hootenanny, where you can scan the DVD for chapter positions.

They are then accessable in Quicktime, VLC or several other media players.

Pretty Easy.

 

[Yuvi]

Sorry to completely contradict absolutely everything that you all just said, but Chapters work perfectly in an MP4 Video File.

All you need to do is use Handbrake to convert the DVD to your output format, then open the final file in Metadata Hootenanny, where you can scan the DVD for chapter positions.

Sorry to contradict what you just said, but Metadata Hootenanny creates MOV files. It cannot add chapters to an MP4 file. The only programs that I'm aware of that can on Mac OS X are MP4Box and MP4Creator, both of which are command-line programs. And QuickTime cannot read the chapters they create, as they are extensions to the MP4 standard.

That said, I did not know that Metadata Hootenanny could read chapters from a DVD.

Also, can someone explain to me the difference between "x.264 (baseline)" and "x.264 (main profile)". Thanks!

Sorry, missed this the first time. Basically, H.264 aka AVC video has multiple profiles that define various features that an encoder can use to compress the video. Then, to decode the video, the decoder must support at least the same profile that the video was encoded. H.264 defines three commonly used profiles: baseline, main, and high. The higher the profile, the more features are defined, and you can get a better quality to size ratio. However, the CPU required to decode the video increases with the higher profiles, and not every decoder supports the higher profiles (example: QuickTime can't decode high profile.) For a better and more in depth explanation, see Doom9, but basically, you'll want to use main profile unless you have problems playing it.

 

[projectle]

Not to contradict you again, but it creates a MOV container, which is still an MP4 video file and whatever other Audio data you threw in.

 

[Yuvi]

Not to contradict you again, but it creates a MOV container, which is still an MP4 video file and whatever other Audio data you threw in.

To correct you yet again, MOV != MP4. They may be extremely similar, in both the atoms that each has and their layout, but there are key differences. For one, the format of certain atoms are different (e.g. stsd.) Second, some atoms are only defined in one format or the other (there is not a hdlr atom for data handlers in MP4's simplified handling of data references.) Third, for anything beyond simple audio and video, the two formats diverge even more (though that doesn't matter too much, since almost nothing supports that in MP4 and only QuickTime for MOV.) There's a lot more differences, but suffice it to say that you're wrong.

Unless you meant to say that it would still have MPEG-4 part 10 video? In that case, video codecs != container formats. And it's container formats that hold chapters.