HANDBRAKE H.264 PROBLEM SOLVED!! DOWNLOAD HERE!!!

Of course the tool from Final Cut is called Compressor!

Brendan,

H.264 is the codec, not the file extension... H.264 video could have any of these extensions and still play on the iPod:

.m4v, .mp4 or .mov

I used this version of handbreak - set it up per someones screenshot posted... ripped the movie Robots... renamed the file to .m4v -- and it is not transferring to my iPod .... what's the deal???

Why would you rename it? Just transfer the mp4 file. Open your file in Quicktime first, press play. If you're using Windows, press ctrl+i and if you're using the Mac, press cmd+i. Make sure your bit rate is below or equal 768 KBit/s. If it is above, you need to recode again. I figured out, if you set the bit rate to 600 the movie comes out just right (resulting in 730 KBit/s.)

My settings for HandBrake: http://www.newtenlightment.de/hbsettings.png
and the picture settings: http://www.newtenlightment.de/hbpicsettings.png

Of course the picture settings depend on your source material. Here the source is 720x480 which will be scaled down to 320x240 and cropped to maintain the correct aspect ratio on my iPod screen. I can live with the loss of some picture information, because I know these series by heart and just want to enjoy the show. And I like to make use of the whole iPod Screen, I don't use the iPod to view the movie on my TV, because that's the reason why I have a DVD player, right? 🙂

Why would you rename it?

Didn't know if this was a rhetorical question or not. Many applications simply filter their associated data files by simply filtering the file name. Others, like QuickTime, actually look at their structure -- the data, its header, how, and/or where it is stored. Thus, applications of the former type would not play even a correctly formatted movie if the file name could not pass the filter. Therefore, the convention of changing file extensions. You will note that attempting to change your movie's extension now invokes a warning to let you know that the file may become usable if the extension is changed.

"Hey iDaze",

How did you set the picture at 320(by)240 ????

When I set the width at 320, the height automatically goes to 170 ???

I would like "240" !!!! Bren !

@brendan: Just uncheck the option "Keep aspect ratio". Then you can change the height.

You're the man !!!

hey brendan, the movie you're encoding might be widescreen, and that's why you're not getting the full 320X240.

On another note, I encoded a full movie at 768kbps with handbrake, and it wouldn't transfer to the ipod, so I checked the info on it, and the average bitrate was 962! whew, so like someone said above, if you set it to 600kbps it turns out just right. Cool! Now I've got to encode the whole dang thing again though.

The funny thing is, with short movies, like trailers and shorts, I was able to encode at 768 and it worked just fine, but when it's with a full length movie, it needs to be set lower.

Ooh, I just checked and those shorts I ripped are indeed 894kbps for their average bit rate, so I guess if it's a shorter movie then the ipod can handle those higher settings. interesting.

I've encoded 2 movies at 768k, The Interpreter and Batman Begins. Both ended up playable on the iPod.

Glor

Interesting. Yeah, there's something going on that I'm sure makes sense. Do you know what the "data rate" ended up being on those movies, if you open them in QT and check the info?

I'm sure the techs at apple are watching us trying to figure out how this ipod ticks. Probably very amusing.

🙂

But be aware of the fact that your source aspect ratio might be different from the iPod. e.g. in my case the source movie's ratio is 720x404 (this is the true ratio of the movie, I got this information out of Compressor.) Scaling it down to 320 will result in vertical ratio of about 176. But we need 240. Scaling up 320x240 to the height of 404 (because we don't want to loose vertical information) results in a source rate of about 540x404. Well, now 720 minus 540 is 180. So we need to crop 180 pixels, thus we need to cut 90 pixels of each side. That is the value I put in the horizontal crop values.