Advice sought on a utility to convert MKV videos to Mp4

[ReggiePerrin]

Hi

Father Crimbo is giving my daughter an Ipad this Christmas, before she gets it I wanted to convert a few movies and preload them on the gizmo.

So I'm looking for recommendations\advice for an app that can convert MKV videos to MP4 to play on the Ipad. I've done the obvious thing and google'd the problem, but that just resulted in page after page of 'free' software offers, and I'm betting most of these aren't as free as they say

Things that would be nice in the convertor:-

• Batch processing, e.g. queue more than one movie for conversion.
  
• Subtitle conversion is not required.
  
• Windows 7 compatible.
  
• Some of the movies I want to convert are 1080p, so being able to convert to a lower resolution would be useful to keep the file size down.
  
• Free; if possible.
  

So if anyone has been here, and done it; I would appreciate your advice and any tips on best conversion settings etc. For example: Is it worth keeping the movie at HD resolution if the output display is only 9.x"?

Thanks in advance

P.S. Has anyone given thoguht to doing an Ipad/Android app which can browse the NPVR EPG, and allow simple scheduling of recordings etc?

[martint123]

I don't have an ipad, but I find Handbrake is quite good for these sort of conversions. Ipad is one of it's destination profiles and if required you can create your own profiles for conversion.
You can also queue files up. Free.

http://handbrake.fr/

[ReggiePerrin]

Thanks for the very quick reply, and saving me a lot of time.

Handbrake is exactly what I was looking for; I've already got it converting the first batch of movies.

cheers
Richard

[steveum]

I would recommend getting Handbrake's nightly build rather than 0.9.4. They have made some improvements in regards to generating better video for the latest apple devices. Use the "high profile" profile for the best results. It is slow, but it always seems to do a good job.

Another tool to consider is AirVideo. It allows you to control the conversions from your ipad/iphone/ipod. The conversion quality is not as good as handbrake, but it may be good enough if you are just viewing on ipad.

[ReggiePerrin]

Thanks steveum

The Handbrake nightly builds are well hidden, I wouldn't have found them if you hadn't told me about them. Handbrake is a really nice piece of software.

AirVideo looks interesting:-

Video Streaming
Air Video can stream videos in almost any format to your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. You don't need to copy your videos to the device just to watch them.

Live Conversion
If the videos in your collection are not in format supported by iPhone or iPad, Air Video will convert them on the fly*. You don't need to wait until the entire video is converted. You can start watching it almost immediately!

* Live Conversion requires iPhone or iPod touch with firmware 3.0 and a sufficiently powerful computer (Intel Core 2 duo or equivalent processor is recommended).

This gives me an option I hadn't thought of. basically I was converting videos to store on the Ipad so they can be played on car-journeys, etc. With AirVideo installed on the TV server (a WHS/NPVR setup running 24x7) my daughter can browse and play movies straight from the video library whilst in the house.

Although the minimum spec for the server is a core2 duo, which exceeds the CPU currently in the WHS setup, and what impact will it have on NPVR when it's converting a movie on the fly, streaming over b/g wireless has got to be painful?

Have you/anyone tried running this software on the same box as NPVR, if so, what is the spec of your machine/wireless network and experiences please?

Thanks in advance.

[steveum]

I run AirVideo on the same machine as NPVR and I really don't have any concurrency issues. I think it runs its queued transcodes at a low priority which is a good thing. My machine is quite beefy though with core i5 750, so your experience my be different.

I don't know what kind of CPU you have in your WHS server. If it is just a ATOM or some other low end processor, you probably would not be able to use the live conversion feature. I mostly just use the queued conversions which really well. Once the video is converted, I think your WHS will have no problems streaming it over the wifi.

It also has a nice feature of allowing you to import the video into itunes from your device. Once it is in itunes, you can play it over an apple tv or get the video on your device to take with you if you sync your device.

[ReggiePerrin]

I do like the idea of the on the fly encoding, creating MP4 duplicates of all the movies seems a bit of a waste.

My WHS setup is based on a lowend desktop machine which is about 4/5 years old now. The CPU is a dual core Pentium something or other, with a 1Gb of memory and 1.5Tb worth of HDDs attached to it. I was toying with the idea of building a new WHS server in the new year, in fact something very similar to your setup; a P55 chipped motherboard with an i5 760 CPU, 4Gb mem, the cheapest video card I can find and 4TBs worth of HDDs.

So it's interesting that your setup can handle NPVR and Air Video with no problems... thanks for the info.