Bob’s iPod & iPhone Video Conversion Basics
Originally published at Bob's Plain 'ol Blog. You can comment here or there.
Several of my friends have recently picked up new iPhones and one of them asked for advice on converting video to put onto the iPhone, so I thought it might be more beneficial to post it up here as opposed to replying directly so everyone could potentially benefit from it (even those with iPods, since the same programs are generally used as for converting video for the iPhone OS devices as regular video-capable iPods).
The iPhone (and video iPods in general) use fairly specific video settings and have similarly restrictive settings that can be used for video intended to be played back on them. There is a decent bit of flexibility obviously, but even for those of us who are accustomed to working with video for things such as making AMVs, by and large it’s nice to have programs that will pretty much take care of everything automatically- especially since there are some rather nice programs out there that will do just this- many of which are completely free. It’s worth noting that the majority of this writeup will be assuming that you are using a Mac computer to do the converting…. this isn’t due to any particular bias of mine against PCs, it’s just that I use my MacBook as the sync computer for my iPhone, so it’s what I tend to use to do my converting of files to use on the iPhone. However, two of the three main pieces of software are available for both platforms (though I don’t have much personal experience with the Windows versions), and the one that is not I have a similar, almost equivalent suggestion for running in Windows.
I’d like to be able to say that there’s just one program that you can get the will cover everything that you’d want to do- but unfortunately at the moment there isn’t (to my knowledge) one that covers all the bases. For myself (and a decent number of the people who I imagine will be reading this…), there are three main ‘classes’ of video that I have to deal with wanting to convert and put on the iPhone. ‘Normal’ computer video formats, DVDs, and subtitled multi-stream capable files (Matroska, soft-subbed MP4). The first two are fairly easily dealt with. The last, which is somewhat unique to anime fans watching digitally fan-subtitled shows, is a bit more annoying and also the only one that I have to recommend a non-free program for.
The easiest by far to deal with are ’simple’ computer video files- you standard AVI, MPEG, and non-softsubbed MP4 files- basically, simple files that just contain an audio stream and a video stream. This is what most converter programs for the devices are intended to convert- so if you’re not happy with the ones I suggest there are a number of others that are readily available online, most of them free. For converting simple files on the Mac, I use a program called iSquint (http://isquint.en.softonic.com/mac). For the PC, I’ve in the past used a program called Videoa iPhone Converter (http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPhone). I should note that if you have other devices that use MP4 video- for example, a PSP- Videora makes a whole line of programs to convert video for different mobile devices. Both iSquint and Videora are fairly simple in operation and free. Using iSquint you just drag the files you want to convert onto the program, set the quality settings at the top of the program, select an output directory, and start converting. Videora is similar, except it uses more of a ‘wizard’ approach to it where it asked you at each step for the info it needs. Both produce good-quality video files for playback on the iPhone and iPods using the basic settings you can choose from, but if you really want to get ‘under the hood’ and tweak the settings, you can do so (at least to a certain extent). iSquint is what I use for the vast majority of video files I want to convert.
Obviously it’s easiest when what you want to put onto the iPhone is already in a nice computer-style format- it’s a bit less convenient when you’re dealing with trying to convert over a DVD. Thankfully, the best free program I’ve found for this is available for all the major platforms: Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr). It does have one limitation: it does not handle any copy protection at all, so you will need to have ripped the DVD you want to convert already and removed the copy protection in the process (which essentially all of the do anyway). I’m not going to go through doing this as it’s a fairly common process these days. Once you have the files on the computer though, Handbrake can work some beautiful magic in converting them to iPhone or iPod format (as well as others). There are some programs that will take care of doing both ripping and converting all in one- the reason that I’m not suggesting these is that at least when I last took a look at them, none of them would handle something that’s a necessity for me as well (if at all) as Handbrake, and that’s adding in the subtitles on anime DVDs that I want to convert. There exists reasonably good documentation on how to do most things you could want to in Handbrake on their site, so I’m not going to go through the exact process of doing it. Handbrake though is a very powerful transcoder that you could probably use in place of the previously mentioned programs if you really wanted to- it’s just not as easy-to-use for simple video conversions from my experience.
The final case to deal with is something that is, as I said, fairly unique to modern anime fandom: soft-subtitled multi-stream video container formats. The most commonly used among anime digisubbers is the Matroska container format, usually identifiable by it’s .mkv file extension. Almost everything being digisubbed these days is put out in the Matroska format as it is rather powerful and can be used to do all sorts of fancy typesetting in the subtitles that groups have become so fond of. While I generally could care less about this type of thing and actually prefer simpler, less distracting subs it’s become pretty much a fact of life these days. Unfortunately, soft-subbed Matroska files are some of the most problematic files to convert over to other formats (I personally think that this is partially why subbers are so fond of using it, something I find highly ironic given the fits they tend to throw about copy-protection or takedown notices from the actual content owners…). To date, I’ve only found one program the will properly convert (on my Mac- I haven’t bought it for the PC since I don’t see the need…) a subtitled MKV file into a ’simple’ video file (either encoded for the iPhone formatting or for use on other devices/computers): Apple’s own Quicktime Pro. It’s been quite a while since I first got my MacBook, so I believe that you have to download an extension (for free) that will play MKV files, but once you have that pretty much any file that you can play with Quicktime can be converted into almost any other format. Now, there are a few caveats on this. First off, QTPro isn’t free- at last count, it’s about $30, which actually isn’t that bad for what it’s capable of doing. Of course, from what I’ve heard it’s going to be an included in Snow Leopard for free, so if you can hold out the intervening time until Snow Leopard comes out then you should be able to save yourself the $30. The other main caveat is that while it does work, it converts the video VERY, VERY SLOWLY. It’s been a while since I’ve tried it, but if I remember correctly it was on the order of 8 hours or so to convert a single 25-minute-long episode. Granted my MacBook isn’t the most powerful computer on the block- but it’s still fairly fast at most things, but this is one that has always taken a very long time. But, as I said, so far it’s the only solution I’ve found that can take a subbed MKV file and convert it, subs intact, for playback on an iPhone or iPod. Hopefully the Windows version has the same capability- if anyone tries it, they’ll have to let me know.
Hopefully that helps out a bit for those who might be interested in this!