Hello !
I am a little bit lot, i just bought a new ipad and i have some issues, actually, i have mkv movies with external srt subtitles files, the thing is that i must use first mkvmerge to merge the srt with the mkv, and then i use subler to convert it to MP4 OK, but it doesn't work sometimes with some mkv files even if the video format is H 264.
Is there a ultimate tool that convert all video files, subtitles external/or not into readable ipad 3 files ? Even if it's a shareware/commercial.
Thanks a lot !
I, too, have been struggling to find a good solution which would output a decent MP4 file. I either get something that's unplayable or audio out-of-sync. I did find a program on Windows that did a good job
XMediaRecode (it's free).
It extracts the video and copies it while encoding the audio into AAC if it's in a different format like AC3, DTS, etc. However, this does take time. On a quad-core PC with a ton of ram and fast hard drives, it took 18 minutes to do a 2 hour movie.
Forget about using
Handbrake because it re-encodes the video, which takes a very long time. The same 2 hour movie would have taken 9-10 hours to complete (no, thank you).
Now when you throw subtitles into the mix, things get a bit complicated. I was not able to get subtitles to work with MP4 files. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think that the MP4 container supports external subtitle files like srt files. You'd have to re-encode the video with hard subtitles.
Every single media player that is on the AppStore (e.g. AVPlayerHD, Buzz Player, etc) uses
software acceleration, with the exception of RushPlayer (it will transcode 15-30 seconds at a time so you'll get this shuttering effect; subtitle support was also very flaky for me; the app is also very unstable).
You might be asking why should you be concerned with software vs. hardware acceleration. If you intend to play 720p or 1080p content, software acceleration will result in two drawbacks: 1) jerky playback and 2) faster battery drain.
Now, if you're open to
jailbreaking your iPad, then I would suggest that you install
XBMC after jailbreaking. It will play nearly any format you throw at it (subtitles supported). It also supports streaming. XBMC uses
hardware acceleration. Jailbreaking also opens up a whole new world of tweaks not available within the realm of the official AppStore.
I tested XBMC out earlier today with a 720p TV episode over wifi (802.11N) and playback was as smooth as butter (jumping around the file will take a few seconds because it's seeking over wifi).
With XBMC, you won't need to do any transcoding or conversion. All you need to do is transfer the file to your iPad (into any folder) using a tool like iFunBox (Windows) or iPhone Explorer (Mac). You won't have to do any of this if you're streaming over wifi.
Then in XBMC, you just add the folder as a video file location/library (applies to streaming also).
There's a slight learning curve that involved with the world of jailbreaking, but once you're comfortable you'll wonder how you'd live without it. I hope that helps
.
