[Daniel Low]

I’d be very surprised if Apple accept your content, it’s possible if the content is unavailable from another source, but the reason Apple ask for 15Mb/s MPEG-2 is because they want very high quality material while still keeping it relatively ‘transportable’. As you are ripping from DVD you are simply not giving them that.

I’ve designed systems for delivery to Apple and I’d always start with at least 50Mb/s I-Frame MPEG-2 for standard def content, this is considered as high as you’d want to go for broadcast quality source material.

What you are doing is taking MPEG-2 that is likely to be at best 5Mb/s and ‘trans-rating’ that to 15Mb/s; a largely pointless exercise as far as quality is concerned – you can’t add quality.

I’d wait to hear back from Apple and then we can take it from there.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

[Mike Liguori] “My hunch here is to convert everything to ProRes 1280×720”

You’re hunch is correct except I’d go to 1920×1080 for all, but it really depends how how the production is going to end up.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

I think WowVx is MPEG, you’d need to find out exactly what type of MPEG it is and then it may be possible to work out how to encode it to maintain each pixel.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

I have to ask, why you earth are re-encoding DVDs at 15Mb/s?

[Abigail Isaac] “For some of the files I’ve encoded, this process has worked perfectly but for a few I can’t seem to raise the bitrate higher than 13 or 14mbps no matter how high i raise the bitrate settings in compressor. “

Where are you getting a readout of the final bitratre?

For those that fall below the 15Mb/s, what type of content are they (Simple, fast moving, complex, detailed etc)

[Abigail Isaac] “I assume I’m using the correct workflow as it’s worked for some of the videos? “

As I have alluded to, your workflow is strange but maybe it’s the best way you have found to achieve a certain something? Let us know what you are actually trying to achieve and maybe we can help further.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

Don’t necessarily look at what they encode with but rather what source they encode from. Typically they work from film quality sources; much, much higher quality than DVCPro HD.

The systems they use would likely be something like Sonic CineVision, CinemaCraft or completely in-house only bespoke systems not available to the public. (Apple use compressor to encode all the movie trailers on their site, but are very strict about the quality of the source they use).

The compressionsts they employ to drive these systems are experts in their field and use techniques like complex segment re-encoding to get the best out of the bit budget.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

[Dan Newton] “so what would the output normally be”

It depends on the use of the output, but it will never be .mpeg but rather .mpg.

MPEG-2 can have the following extensions depending on output type.

.mpg
.m2v
.ts
.m2t
.mxf

etc..

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

[Christopher Travis] “I am currently using the bog-standard 1MB streaming codec.”

Don’t use the streaming preset unless you are delivering from a Flash Streaming server.

[Christopher Travis] “Back when I was using Compressor I knew that if there was a serious problem I could get stuck in and put some i-frames in to help it along the way. Can anyone tell me how to do this in squeeze?”

You can’t, you can only alter the frequency of forced keyframes. I generally set this at 5-10x your delivery frame rate. Sorenson will insert others automatically when it think it needs to.

Try using VBR.

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

You need to output a program stream on order for the audio and video to be part of the same file.

[Daniel Low]

[Dan Newton] “yes m2v — how come it doesn’t have a mpeg output”

That is MPEG-2. ‘m2v’ stands for “MPEG-2 Video”.

Your audio will be encoded as a separate file ready to be taken into your DVD authoring application.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2V

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009

[Daniel Low]

[Andrew Brooks] “The problem is the files come from the vault as four separate .mp4 files”

Please tell us more about these files e.g. frame size, datarate, erames per second, overall video quality etc, you can get the basic info by opening them in Quicktime and pressing the Apple key + i

__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007

“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”

Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009