Saturday, November 01, 2008

Convert iPhone movies nightmare

I have some movies that I want to put into iPod Touch. These movies are in Xvid (Divx) format, since iPod Touch support quicktime and mp4 (H.264) format, but not Xvid, I need to convert it into mp4 or qt.

iSquint is a freeware, easy to use, but development of the software seems has stopped. ffmpegX is open source software, it need another few open source software like mpeg2enc, mencoder, mplayer to work. These binaries can be downloaded from the internet easily.

I have tried iSquint and ffmpegX, both software seems to take forever to complete. To encode a 100 minutes move into a H.264 mp4 media file, on my iBook G3 700Mhz processor, estimate takes 10 hours or more. (Ya, may be I should upgrade)

The encoding processing time is not the worst nightmare. I prefer to add in subtitles. I have tried Submerge, is a shareware cost $9. Submerge add the subtitle directly into the movie file, that means I can't disable the subtitle.

I prefer to have soft subtitles on the iPod Touch, means I can show and hide the subtitles, whenever I want. mp4 support timed text, you can save the subtitle as text into the mp4 file, normally I have the subtitle file as a separated file. With timed text, just need 1 mp4 file.

I found handbrake and muxo, is free and is open source software (that's great!). Muxo fail to run, it doesn't like my G3 cpu.

Never-mind, I found another open source software-- mp4box, which do the same thing, add timed text into mp4, unfortunately it runs on Windows. Since it is an open source software, I believe there are binary compile for Mac. I search around but only found binary for Intel Mac, and my G3 is ppc.

I have to give up, for now. I should have compiled the software myself as before, but not now, may be next time.