ATV H.264 Supported Profiles...
#1
XBMC team, great job. I truly appreciate your efforts.

Now, if I am wrong please correct me, but I’ve been trying to understand all this profile stuff with H.264 codec and ATV. Maybe it was spelled out somewhere, but I could not find it.

From reading many posts I know that the moderators are getting sick of answering the same question too.

I think I have it understood now, so if anyone is as out of it as I was/am and you are looking for a beginner’s way to determine if you can play a MKV contained file here is what you can do. Again, I’m a newbie, so put me in my place if I’m wrong.

I know there are other ways but I basically used mediainfo to view the details of the MKV file. From what I can find, here are the supported video resolutions for the ATV:

640 x 480 - 30fps - H.264/protected H.264 LC version of Baseline Profile
320 x 240 - 30fps - H.264/protected H.264 Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3
1280 x 720 - 24fps - H.264/protected H.264 Progressive Main Profile
640 x 480 - 30fps - MPEG-4 Simple Profile

Also, the bit rate cannot be greater then 5-6MB/sec.

So, as an example I open up Full Metal Jacket and it details the profile as
[email protected].... so, I predictable get jerkiness when watching this one....that sucks.

I open up Indian Jones and the profile is [email protected].... and this looks and plays great on the ATV.

Unfortunately, most of the MKV's I have are encoded with a higher profile then 1.3.

I wish when people were encoding this stuff they would make available the profiles that it is encoded in. I guess downloading the samples and verifying them when available is an alternative. You get what you pay for I guess.

I think I got it...hope it helps someone else.
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#2
@lippsenator -> Excellent post, I've been looking for a simple app that displays the encoding info to use for debugging video content issues.

For OSX users, get mediainfo from

http://mediainfo.massanti.com/releases/m...7.7.58.dmg
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#3
Great, thanks a lot. It'll be helpful when I start handbraking my HD mkv files for the tv (not too many, probably 12).
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#4
So, after playing around with Handbrake I can't seem to find the killer preset. The Apple TV preset creates a very good quality file at a decent size (a 4.3GB movie ended up at about 1.4GB), but I still don't know if this is the maximum I can push my tv.
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#5
Are you talking about converting mkv to m4v/mp4 and playing on the AppleTV "Frontrow" or just playing the mkv from XBMC on aTV? I've spent a good bit of time attempting it both ways trying to find a consistent zone. I seem to get better results at this stage converting my hd files to m4v and just loading through frontrow. However, I miss out of the xbmc experience and would much prefer to go that route if I could find a hq setting without jerkiness.

I have found some success using EncodeHD, using the xbox360 preset.

Has anyone got a handbrake profile they want to share?
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#6
WAdam Wrote:Are you talking about converting mkv to m4v/mp4 and playing on the AppleTV "Frontrow" or just playing the mkv from XBMC on aTV? I've spent a good bit of time attempting it both ways trying to find a consistent zone. I seem to get better results at this stage converting my hd files to m4v and just loading through frontrow. However, I miss out of the xbmc experience and would much prefer to go that route if I could find a hq setting without jerkiness.

I have found some success using EncodeHD, using the xbox360 preset.

Has anyone got a handbrake profile they want to share?

Playing the M4V through XBMC. I don't use Frontrow at all actually, all my media is played within XBMC. I'm converting Iron Man (4.3GB MKV) into M4V for Apple TV using Handbrake with the Apple TV preset (although I upped the quality from 59 to 75%). I'll see the results in 3 hours.
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