Streaming Original Quality files to Apple TV

[ravigupta]

Hi

Like I have said else where on the forum, I am fairly new to the disk ripping scene having just discovered MakeMKV. Like most of the fellow members of this forum, I am creating a personal library of movies that I love. Here is the vision I originally had and am trying to get it to work with near success - launch iTunes Home sharing on Apple TV (3rd Gen.) and play the movies present in there with the highest possible quality using either the Apple TV physical or virtual remote. I came very close to making it all work by following these steps -

1. Rip Blu-Ray disk using MakeMKV and save the original MKV file somewhere.
2. Use MP4Tools to convert it to M4V, something that the Apple devices can process and understand. Depending on if the MKV file has and H.264 codec vs VC-1 the conversion to MP4 can take anywhere between 1 hour to 24 hours on my 2012 Core i5 MacBook Air (I have very cautiously stayed away from HandBrake so far because I would like to stay as close to the original quality as possible, even for the M4V files.).
3. Store the MKV and M4V files in identical hard drives to mirror each other.
4. Add the M4V drive (connected via USB3) to iTunes running on the MacBook Air.
5. Share the iTunes library so it can show up on Apple TV.
6. Choose the movie and press play on the Apple TV remote.

This set-up works very great when it does. Sometimes movies just randomly start buffering and then even the movies that were playing fine previously stop working to the point where I have to either restart iTunes or Apple TV or both.

Now I know from trial and error that the issue here is the sheer size of the M4V files. They are almost identical to the original MKVs. Here are the steps I took to make sure that I was compensating for the big file size in any other way I can:
1. Making sure both Apple TV and MacBook Air are on ethernet only.
2. Making sure the file being shared via iTunes is stored locally instead of being stored on a disk connected via USB3.
3. AirPlaying the files using iTunes directly to the Apple TV
4. Accessing the files using iTunes app on my iPhone 6+ and then AirPlaying them so that the iPhone acts as a conduit.
5. Plex - the Plex app stutters and crashes. Also tried Plex on Roku.
6. VLC Streamer.
7. Beamer.
8 AirParrot.

Is getting a new HTPC or converting the files to a lower quality the only options I have?

[Woodstock]

"Shear size of the M4V"... as in, larger than 4GB?

If so, Handbrake will create a 64-bit M4V file when this happens. Does MP4Tools?

As for avoiding Handbrake, what quality issues did you experience? You can tell Handbrake to encode at a variety of quality settings, dependent upon the device you intend to use the result with.

Of course, this isn't the support forum for MP4Tools or Handbrake....

Incidentally, the encode times you're quoting are WAY longer than they should be. My 4-core AMD machine can manage 12-18 frames per second on a full-quality BD encode to h264, which means a 3 hour movie takes under 6 hours to encode. The speeds you're getting are similar to what people report with the OLD version of the h265 encoder, which didn't take advantage of multiple cores... but ATV isn't compatible with h265, so that's a moot point.