As yet another iTunes update gets forced onto our systems, there is one light at the end of the tunnel and that's all your iOS devices can now stream videos so long as they're in line with Apple's specifications. Here's how to get everything converted and playing in no time.
Using the instructions found over at our favorite DIY blog, Lifehacker, you can easily convert any media into the format of your choice. The choice being Apple's, of course (H.264 video and AAC audio).
All you need is Handbrake or Evom (OSX-only), a little bit of patience, and 5-minutes of your time.
[Via Lifehacker]
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Comments (5)
I'm hoping you can use VLC player via iphone/ipad to push content onto ATV2. That alone will sell me on an ATV. Otherwise, I'm sure jailbreakers will get on it soon enough and open up other formats. All I want is avi and mkv!!
@Matt M. My sentiments exactly.
I don't get why anyone still uses avi's and mkv's. All my video content (including HD) is converted to .mp4. For the sake of a few minutes per file, it really makes life easier for syncing to iDevices!
The only thing preventing me from converting all of my videos is the lack of a decent free way to do them all at once. Handbrake is great for doing a few files, but it's tedious when you start talking hundreds of files. Does anyone know of a free OS X software that I can just drag and drop all of these files on, set my output settings, walk away and come back eventually to them all converted?
You can use handbrake from shell scripts pretty easily. You could probably write some applescript and make it a nice droplet to play nicely with OSX, but I am a curmudgeon so I use the following shell script to convert my old AVI files over. Just save as transcode.sh and then run as 'transcode.sh *.avi *.mkv' and you will end up with a transcoded/xxxx.m4v file for each of the input files.
Note that the handbrake-cli is not included in the normal GUI download - you have to pull it down separately.
If you want to use something other than iphone/ipod presets just change the --preset flag (perhaps 'Universal' would be best for appletv/ipad viewing)
#!/bin/sh
HB=/usr/local/bin/HandBrakeCLI
for if in "$@"
do
mkdir -p transcoded
bn="${if}"
bn=`basename "${bn}" .avi`
bn=`basename "${bn}" .mp4`
bn=`basename "${bn}" .mkv`
bn=`basename "${bn}" .m4v`
of="`pwd`/transcoded/${bn}.m4v"
if [ -f "${of}" ]; then
echo "Skipping `basename \"${of}\"`"
continue;
fi
${HB} --preset 'iPhone & iPod Touch' -I -m -t 1 -c 1 -i "${if}" -o "${of}"
done