Remuxed H.264 solid green with scrambling?

[glangmead]

I used MakeMKV to rip the LOTR extended trilogy Blu-rays. The output MKV files play great in VLC. Handbrake can transcode them at a high quality and they look tremendously glorious on my iPad 3. But they are H.264 so I want to try a lossless remux to MP4. I split the video and audio (I tried both with mkvtoolnix on Windows and also with mp4tools on Mac, with the same results I describe below). I transcoded the audio to AAC. I tried remuxing with mp4tools, with mp4box, and with Subler, all on the Mac. The output of Subler is a file that won't open in VLC or Quicktime, so forget that one. The output from the other two are recognized as video, and the audio plays, but the video is solid green with some scrambled noise at the top. I tried muxing the video by itself with the same result. The split H.264 file that came out of the splitters can play in VLC on its own, but is jumpy like it's not decoding it properly. Still, it seems to have the data there.

Any tips for debugging this problem with remuxing? It can't still be encrypted, can it? And would my Mac please stop correcting the word "remux" to "remix"? Thanks.

[Smithcraft]

I don't know why your Mac is autocorrecting what you are typing. Maybe a better browser?

The Subler mux file I'm guessing didn't work because of the issue with mp4 files over 4GB, and the chunksize deal.

I think you are going to have to just transcode with Handbrake and specify the mp4 container, and make sure that 'large file size' is checked.

There is an iOS app that will play MKV files, but I would have to look it up either here, or at the Handbrake forums.

SC

[glangmead]

The Mac has an autocorrect feature that's active whenever you type, unless you turn it off. It's just that the word "remuxing" keeps coming up for me lately and it wants to correct it. I can probably add it to a dictionary somewhere.

I did snag VLC for iPad before the team yanked it from the App Store, so I could technically watch the lossless rip that way, but it would require transferring the entire 30G file onto the iPad, whereas I can use iTunes Home Sharing to stream an MP4 from my Mac.

The outputs from mp4box and mp4tools were playable in Quicktime, but with corrupted video, could that be a symptom of chunksize and/or large filesize? That's not an issue I'm familiar with.

Thanks for the reply.

[Romansh]

The output of Subler is a file that won't open in VLC or Quicktime, so forget that one.

Try again. When saving in Subler, make sure that "64 bits chunk offsets" is checked and that "64 bits times" is unchecked.

[glangmead]

That checkbox did the trick. I used MP4Tools to transcode the DTS audio track to AAC stereo, then opened the mkv in Subler plus the AAC file, set its preferences to transcode AC3 to AAC (to get the four commentary tracks), hit Save, hit the 64-bit checkbox, and the output is great! I then had to discover that I should uncheck all but the primary audio track and put them in the same group number, but those fixes didn't require writing out the whole file all over again, since I guess they're just lightweight metadata inside the container.

Thanks for that tip!

[Smithcraft]

Off topic but - my Mac never auto-corrects me. It does suggest correct spelling though. Nor has any Mac that I've used since 1984.

Otherwise, Plex offers a streaming to iOS (to the iOS Plex app) option also.

SC

[glangmead]

Autocorrect is new in 10.7. It's designed to look just like iOS, and is one of the "back to the Mac" features. I attached a small screenshot. If I hit the spacebar, it will just substitute its suggestion.

[Smithcraft]

I guess that's another reason I don't like 10.7!

SC

[Romansh]

I guess that's another reason I don't like 10.7!

It can be disabled (System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Correct spelling automatically).