Howto: Converting WMV HD (and other videos) to iPhone

[BrakBrak]

It took me a while to find an H.264 iPhone compliant encoder that properly transcoded HD WMV content without audio sync issues on the PC platform.

I tried the CuCusoft iPhone Video Converter (garabage, iTunes wouldn't allow the the video files it created to sync with the iPhone), Videora iPhone Converter (very easy to use, great luck with XViD sources), Canopus ProCoder v3 (slow, buggy), SUPER (kept resetting my specified vertical resolution from 204 to 208), MediaCoder (many options, requires higher than average knowledge to use), and finally the one that worked "meGUI". Unfortunately "meGUI", as usual with these things, is the hardest/most confusing to setup and use. But once you setup it up, and use it once, it's pretty easy to use for subsequent encodes. Media Coder was the only one of two programs that could even complete the encode of my HD WMV source file, and MeGUI was the only one that could complete it without audio sync issues.

To help others that may run into the same issues, here's a quick write-up of my setup:

Installation:

• meGUI (I used v0.2.6.1040)
  (requires Microsoft .NET Runtime 2.0)
  
• AviSynth (I used v2.5.7)
  
• Latest version of x264.exe (I used revision v703)
  
• Nero AAC Codec (I used v1.1.34.2)
  
• My iPhone Audio/Video profiles (attached)

Setup:

1. Install AviSynth.
   
2. Install meGUI.
   
3. Put the audio iPhone profile attached (iPhone Audio.xml) attached into the megui\profiles\Audio folder
   
4. Put the video iPhone profile attached (iPhone 2pass - 768kbps L2.1.xml) into the megui\profiles\Video folder
   
5. Under the megui\tools\ folder create a folder named ndaac, place all the .exe files from the Nero AAC Codec into that folder.
   
6. Run meGUI.
   
7. Go to the Options menu, and choose Update
   
8. Press the Update button and update everything
   (Select all the profiles the updater offers to download for you too, it doesn't hurt to have them)
   
9. Copy the latest version of x264.exe into the megui\tools\x264 folder.

meGUI Configuration:

• Go to Options menu and select the Settings menu.
  
• On the Main tab, uncheck the Open Preview after AviSynth script selection option.
  
• On the Program Paths tab, select the Audio subtab, and for the neroAacEnc point it to the location of where you put the Nero AAC Codec executables (neroAacEnc_SSE.exe for SSE capable CPUs, neroAacEnc.exe for all other CPUs).
  
• Press the Save button.

Conversion Quickstart:

There is an intimidating amount of options and features in MeGUI. I'm only going to cover the settings I had to set for my WMV HD source sample. The profiles I created are tweaked for the highest quality encode, closest to the iPhone's native LCD resolution (480x320).

In meGUI you can't select the video source file directly, you must create an AviSynth script for it first, and then select the script as your source. I know this sounds confusing, but this extra step is pretty easy using the tools provided. For the purposes of this tutorial my source video was a 2 hour long HD-WMV file (2.35 aspect ratio, 23.976 fps, 1920x820). Of course you should adapt the steps/settings to correspond to your source video. A good guide for using a DVD as your source is here.

1. To create the AviSynth script, in MeGUI go to the Tools menu, and select AviSynth Script Creator.
   
2. In the AviSynth script creator dialog, on the Options tab, select your source video file in the Video Input section (I couldn't see/select WMV files, so in open dialog, in the "Files of type" combobox, I had to select "All files").
   
3. Once you select/open your source video file, a video preview window will open, go ahead and close it.
   
4. Back in AviSynth script creator dialog, on the Options tab, go ahead and select/change your input DAR (aspect ratio) if it's incorrect.
   
5. In the Resolution Crop section, make sure Resize is checked. Set the resolution to a value that makes sense for the source video's aspect ratio. Since my source video file has a 2.35 aspect ratio, with a resolution of 1920x820, and the iPhone LCD native resolution is 480x320, I set the resize value to 480x204 (meGUI will complain about the 204 resolution multiple times, because it's not a multiple of 16, just ignore these warnings). To figure out the right values for you videos, a nice online aspect ratio calcualtor is here.
   
6. On the Filters tab, verify the information is correct (for my source video, I verified that the FPS under the Avi Options section was set to 23.976).
   
7. Press the Save button to save your AviSynth script.
   
8. Back in meGUI in the Input tab, under the Video encoding section, select the AviSynth Script we just created.
   
9. Make sure Codec is set to x264.
   
10. Make sure File format is set to MP4.
    
11. Make sure Video profile is set to iPhone 2pass - 768kbps L21.
    
12. Under the Audio section, select your source video file for Audio Input
    
13. Make sure Audio Profile is set to IPhone Audio
    
14. Make sure Codec is set to ND AAC
    
15. Make sure Extension is set to MP4-AAC
    
16. Press the AudioEncode button.
    
17. On the Automatic Encoder dialog, make sure, under the Output Options section, that the Container is set to MP4.
    
18. On the Automatic Encoder dialog, make sure, under the Size and Bitrate section, that the No Target Size (use profile settings) option is selected.
    
19. Press the Queue button.
    
20. Multiple jobs should now be in the queue. Back in MeGUI, on the Queue tab, press the Start button to start your encoding process, wait for it to finish, and that's it!

My meGUI iPhone audio/video profiles can be downloaded : here.

[MOSHO92]

Thanks for the write-up. Have you tried handbrake?

[Pilgrim]

Thank you for the guide!

[BrakBrak]

Originally Posted by MOSHO92

Thanks for the write-up. Have you tried handbrake?

Everything I've read online says that Handbrake is pretty flawless on the Apple platform, but on the PC platform it's not so great.