Letterman on South Park

[flavius]

My kids decided recently to convert their shows for their ipod/iphone and starting queuing up lots of jobs bringing my (quite old) server to its knees. So I decided to have them use their own much more powerful machines for the conversion process.

First I tried Videora: no sound in the converted file. Then I used the conversion feature in iTunes 9. Same thing. It appears that the show I picked for testing was a HDHR recording with 2 audio tracks, with the first one seemingly silent and the second one kinda garbled, according to VLC at least which can't render the audio correct either. Sage Placeshifter (Mac), however can play the original recording just fine. Sage Placeshifter (Vista64) crashes by the way.

Then I looked at a bunch of other HDHR recordings of their shows. VLC would play most of them fine, Quicktime Pro (with mpeg) wouldn't do any audio. While checking out all those audio tracks, I found one South Park episode which had on track 1 the audio for the Letterman show.



Any suggestions for the software I should get for my kids (mac, xp/vista64) that can handle those files? Well, I could beef up my server, but all those multi-core machines must be good for something other then wow, right?

Edit: I should add that I know that both the SageTranscoder and Videora use ffmpeg.

[paulbeers]

I use Handbrake GUI. You can even queue up a ton of videos and let it run all night. I should specify that I have only used it for converting DVD's to iPod and iPod Touch formats (it has them already setup to convert any video to the right format), but it should handle just about any "standard" video format you throw at it.

[pjpjpjpj]

I've just started using "Any Video Convertor". It's freeware, and so far, has handled everything I have thrown at it - from my 1080p camcorder's .MTS files to 1080i HDHR recordings in SageTV, to old AVI's from my Canon Powershot G2, circa 2002 (before you laugh, even the Sage HDTheater can't handle them). I've used it to convert to them to .MP4 and DVD-quality MPEG2 and so far, it has worked flawlessly.

The thing I have appreciate most about it is the speed - running it on a Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, 4 Gb RAM, Vista64. As a curiosity check, I just converted a 45-second-long 1080i Sage recording (from HDHR) to "iPhone .MP4" - from an original size of about 71 Mb down to 1 Mb - and it didn't even take 30 seconds.

As for quality of the final output, I don't know about that - I have been using it to convert very small clips of HD down to small SD files for various uses. I haven't tried it on anything long or for any high-res output.