Transcode 200+ movies for iTunes or...

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I know this has been asked many times, especially since I've read through several threads. My purpose for asking is not how, but if.

I have about 450 movies ripped from DVDs and blurays, many of which were ripped using Mkv container & AC3 pass through. Of them about half (the latter half) are in m4v format. All were made using Handbrake. So to my question.

Would you spend the time needed to transcode all of the iTunes incompatibles or find some other work around for watching the movies from an ATV3?

Worth noting: I have an 8 Mac Pro at work that gets used about 10% of the time that I could setup a batch on.
Also, I have never owned an ATV and thus I haven't ever JB one, but I did run Plex from a Mac Mini for a period of time.

Thanks for opinions!

 

[obsidian1200]

If you made all of the .mkvs with handbrake (it sounds like you did, since you mentioned they all have AC3 pass thru tracks), there might be a good chance the video streams are in the right format (h.264). To check, you can download subler and open the .mkv with that. If the video is an h.264 stream, then you should be able to just remux the video and audio into an .m4v container, which doesn't take that long per file, no transcoding/encoding required.

If I'm mistaken about the video stream, then nevermind haha. I'd wait for a jailbreak if possible, or just set up a batch encoding session to convert the files for the sake of wider compatibility with devices.

 

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Thanks for the info. Sure enough after posting I still kept reading and it seems like Subler might do exactly what you said. If I can remux all or most of the mkvs then that answers my question of if, since I won't be waiting on a transcode.

Next question (which I'll answer if I find) is whether the remuxed movies will work okay with ATV if the original Mkv rip ONLY had AC3 chosen and not AAC as well?

 

[HarryPot]

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Thanks for the info. Sure enough after posting I still kept reading and it seems like Subler might do exactly what you said. If I can remux all or most of the mkvs then that answers my question of if, since I won't be waiting on a transcode.

Next question (which I'll answer if I find) is whether the remuxed movies will work okay with ATV if the original Mkv rip ONLY had AC3 chosen and not AAC as well?

Subler also converts the audio to an Apple TV friendly format. And that is done fairly quickly.

Also, my experience with Subler is not so good. It is nice for adding subtitles and editing metadata, but for remuxing I would use either Remux, SmartConverter or iFlicks. The former is free, can do batch processing, and is very good overall.

My favorite right now if iFlicks. It costs 19 bucks, but it does an incredible work remuxing your files and at the same time, adding automatically all the metadata.

 

[hafr]

My favorite right now if iFlicks. It costs 19 bucks, but it does an incredible work remuxing your files and at the same time, adding automatically all the metadata.

This, but with a twist. Use iFlicks 1.2.3 instead of the latest version (1.4.2 I think), and use the "Flatten to QuickTime movie" or whatever the setting is called. It's much, much faster than the newer versions if all you want to do is remuxing whilst adding metadata. Also, it's free for 15 days, so no need to buy it if you can go through your collection in time

http://www.iflicksapp.com/download/iFlicks_1.2.3_724.dmg