Conchero
10th June 2010, 12:33
Does anyone know if it is possible to get XVID videos to a format that can play natively on the iPad without re-encoding the video?
I have many GB's of dled movies which are mostly in XVID video/MP3 audio in AVI container that I would like to avoid spending hours with my laptop churning away to re-encode them to the iPad's preferred format.
Theoretically (and there lots of complicated issues here), XVID is just MP4 video and MP4 is one of the formats that the iPad can play (in addition to H.264).
I spent about 8 hours researching how to do this and I was ultimately successful with 3 of the 10 videos I tried.
Ideally I'm looking for a solution with command line tools because I have dozens of these XVID videos and I'd like to automate/batch the conversion somehow.
There are two reasons the AVI/XVID files can't play in their current format on the iPad: 1.) the AVI container, and 2.) the MP3 audio. It needs to be in a native MP4 container with AAC audio. So I discovered a technique using a combination of MP4BOX and FFMPEG command line tools to sort of get this to work. FFMPEG re-encodes the MP3 audio to AAC and MP4BOX remuxes the MP4 video from the AVI file (with the new AAC audio track) to a native MP4 file.
Like I said, 3 of the 10 files I tried worked fine and look great on the iPad. It took a few moments to re-encode the audio and passthrough copy the video the remuxed MP4 files, but nothing like the hours it would take to re-encode the video to H.264.
Of the 7 that didn't work, I got it to the point where my new MP4 files would playback fine in Quicktime Pro/X, load into iTunes, and copy over to the iPad no problem. But when I played the videos on the iPad the video was badly distorted, with many artifacts, like the version of MP4 video I was giving it was not something the iPad hardware could playback. (But it never gave me any error or refusal to play it.) This issue is beyond my understanding of the details of the MP4 video standard and the iPad's video capabilities.
Is there anyone who knows more about this who can suggest something else I should try or am I wasting my time with this idea and I should bite the bullet and re-encode them?
I have many GB's of dled movies which are mostly in XVID video/MP3 audio in AVI container that I would like to avoid spending hours with my laptop churning away to re-encode them to the iPad's preferred format.
Theoretically (and there lots of complicated issues here), XVID is just MP4 video and MP4 is one of the formats that the iPad can play (in addition to H.264).
I spent about 8 hours researching how to do this and I was ultimately successful with 3 of the 10 videos I tried.
Ideally I'm looking for a solution with command line tools because I have dozens of these XVID videos and I'd like to automate/batch the conversion somehow.
There are two reasons the AVI/XVID files can't play in their current format on the iPad: 1.) the AVI container, and 2.) the MP3 audio. It needs to be in a native MP4 container with AAC audio. So I discovered a technique using a combination of MP4BOX and FFMPEG command line tools to sort of get this to work. FFMPEG re-encodes the MP3 audio to AAC and MP4BOX remuxes the MP4 video from the AVI file (with the new AAC audio track) to a native MP4 file.
Like I said, 3 of the 10 files I tried worked fine and look great on the iPad. It took a few moments to re-encode the audio and passthrough copy the video the remuxed MP4 files, but nothing like the hours it would take to re-encode the video to H.264.
Of the 7 that didn't work, I got it to the point where my new MP4 files would playback fine in Quicktime Pro/X, load into iTunes, and copy over to the iPad no problem. But when I played the videos on the iPad the video was badly distorted, with many artifacts, like the version of MP4 video I was giving it was not something the iPad hardware could playback. (But it never gave me any error or refusal to play it.) This issue is beyond my understanding of the details of the MP4 video standard and the iPad's video capabilities.
Is there anyone who knows more about this who can suggest something else I should try or am I wasting my time with this idea and I should bite the bullet and re-encode them?