Hey Guys I would like a little help. i have been given an ipad 2, well strategically stolen my mums . I am having trouble finding a free program that will convert my movies/series into the required format. I have tried google, but everything thats "free" is not or if it is it has some catch . i wont be doing any dvd ripping or anything like that, just want to put my existing files onto my ipad. what are people using? thanks (windows 7 64 bit, i5, 4 gig ram, 5870 1 gig)
i've been using kvip, but it is a batch file processor, doesn't have ANY configurable option. released in iPhone 1/3G era, so output video quality is pretty low. but at least file size is small and allows you to store a lot of videos.
Thanks bro , i thought it was more of a ripping program. i am busy trying it out. anyways to make the converting quicker. mpeg4 rather than h.264 (will i be losing quality?)
h.264 is better than mpeg4 as you get the same quality for around half the size. However its more CPU intensive but should be fine i think. there are Iphone presets on handbrake maybe a an ipaqd one i forget best thing is to play around with it a bit. For Ipad you will need to use MP4 as the container ipad supports h.264 and various audio codecs but not sure which.
Again, no point in converting, I haven't found a format flexplayer doesn't support. 600MB episode copies onto my ipad in around 30 seconds. It's free too. Watched an hour long .avi and it used around 3% battery. http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/flex-player/id451024857?mt=8
Freemake is good for converting to h.264 aac m4v. It is a LOT faster than handbrake. There is a point in converting if we're talking about hd. No reason to have 1080p high bitrate file that takes up half the devices storage when you can drop the quality with it still looking quite good and using a fraction of the space.
i remember something about a program that will change the "packaging" from .avi to .mp4 and most of the time the only thing that needed recoding was the audio. I can't remember anything about where to get sadly
mkvtomp4... but the video codec already has to be h.264 or it can't do a container change. It does .avi even though there is no mention. Not sure if that was what you were thinking of? This is the quickest way by far to get an mkv or avi to ipad compliant mp4, but it won't make it (much) smaller if it is a huge HD file. There will be a slight filesize reduction going from dts/ac3 to aac, but not huge.
Use MAKEMKV to rip your DVD's. (I know you said you don't need to rip, but someone else might find this step useful). Then use FREEMAKE or HANDBRAKE to encode into MP4 format for playback on the iPAD. FREEMAKE is probably the easiest to use for a novice.
Youtube Downloader is another one - I use it to both download stuff from youtube (randomly enough...) and it can also convert to mp4 and various other formats. It's a very basic program so compared to the likes of handbrake etc I wouldn't expect much, but it's small and easy to use. I shall look at the other ones with interest...
am i missing anything with Freemake? tried it out last night, at same resolution as kvip, and same frame rate, it's twice size of kvip with same quality. problem it seems is that it is constant bit-rate. anyone know how to make it variable bit-rate? a Xvid encoded TV show at 178MB is encoded to be 180MB using x264 with worse quality due to lower iphone1 resolution, something has to be wrong here. interface is well designed though. and like the trim/combine feature.
