I guess I'll update this as I go along, instead of posting a single long essay once I have things figured out to my satisfaction. So, last night I wrote about the fact that transcoding HD content with EyeTV 2 to h.264 at 24fps left much to be desired. (Later today, I'll provide specific screen shots of what I was doing, what I did and what I'll try.) I started transcoding another CSI episode, this time no specific fps, rather, I left the settings at automatic (which means ~30 fps). I set the bit-rate at 3500 kbps (usually, more than adequate to get the color and picture content), but didn't transcode using multi-pass. Well, this morning, I fired up the Apple TV and played the clip and... it still sucks. The choppy frame-rate is gone. So, that means that the device is capable of handling over 24 fps encoded material. The picture, however, exhibited jagged edges around all of the characters on screen. The more movement, the more jagged the edges got. I remember this being an issue when I first was testing without Apple TV, but in this case, I wanted to make sure that it could handle a 24 fps+ encoded file. It obviously does. So, back to the workshop. I'm taking the same clip now and transcoding with the same settings, but this time with multi-pass set. We'll see what happens later...
Technorati Tags: apple, apple tv, technology, transcoding, video
Hi
After you have finetuned your transcoding process, please post how you get this TV content in iTunes. I'm on the brink of buying an Apple TV but I want to make sure that the 300GB of kids movies I now have on HD can be played on the Apple TV. I have a single G5, but that is not used between 1700 and 0900 so I can transcode a lot of stuff.
My poor G4 runs movies all day and needs a break from my hard-pouning kids.