Does anyone know what settings I should be using to create a movie that can be played on an iPad? I’m sure it has something to do with Quicktime, MPeg-4 and/or H.264 but I am struggling with my trial and erroring (been going at it for a couple of hours now). also been having issues sometimes with an error message saying “couldn’t initialize codec”. And while I’m at it, I’ve been having issues with audio not coming through when using Quicktime presets.
I’m using 2.49b
Cheers
Have you checked the tech spec for the iPad, it should tell you what encoding settings are acceptable?
With 2.49b to solve the ‘failed to initialize codec’ choose the h264 presets for FFMPEG and then add qdiff 4 in the encoder panel, it’s a long list of encoder flags below the ‘Add’ and ‘Menu’ boxes so if you have your interface horizontal you’ll need to stretch everything up to see them. Hope that makes sense.
For audio don’t forget to multiplex it in. In the audio panel, suggest AAC.
Thanks Yellow, I eventually came across the qdiff-4 fix and have applied that. I tried the settings you suggested (using AAC) but Blender crashes every time.
I have had some success with using the Quicktime preset rather than the FFMPeg preset on the “Format” tab in the Render buttons. Then selecting H.264 as the codec. I can create a movie which plays on my iPad very nicely with lovely quality (1024 x 768 res for those who are interested). However I can not get the audio file thats in my VSE window to mix using this method. The movie has no sound. And the Audio tab does not appear when using this method so I can’t select “Multiplex Audio”.
When I go the other way and select FFMPeg under the Format tab and then select Quicktime or MPeg-4 as the format under the Video tab with the H.264 presets in place (as well as qdiff-4 added), I get the following results:
Multiplex Audio selected with MP3 Codec: Sound comes through but no video (VLC plays both audio and video but I need it to work with the Quicktime player or no go with the iPad)
Multiplex Audio selected with AAC Codec: Blender crashes
Perhaps there’s a setting under the Sound Block buttons I could change? (Have tried playing around here a bit without success)
Appreciate any suggestions.
Apparently QT native codec in Blender has no muxing (as you’ve found) and ffmpeg sux for Iphone/touch/pad/tunes/anything mac related.
I’m on Vista but running 2.53 and find that AAC export does not crash Blender. Also I could not make a ffmpg h264/itunes compatible file, so I re-encoded the Blender result via VLC .8 (.9 has a bug that wont allow correct QT files creation).
I WISH Blender muxed right, it drives me nuts, along with colour space errors and bit rate export. Hmmm all that seems to be ffmpeg issues…
Thanks for that. I agree. I’m no AV guru but I can’t imagine why it’d be so hard to get audio to work with the Blender Quicktime preset.
On 2.49b encoding AAC regularly crashed for me.
Jon sounds like you’re on Windows, do you have a AAC encoder on your system, is the FFMPEG you have built with the non free (not GPL’d) codecs like AAC, if you don’t have the codec that could explain the crashes.
Yes I’m on Windows Yellow. I don’t know whether I have the AAC encoder or not, but it sounds like even if I did I wouldn’t be able to make an iPad compatible file anyway going by 3pointEdit’s reply. I’ve installed ffdshow. Don’t know whether that makes a difference or not.
Try Avidemux perhaps, That’s my approach, render out from Blender as AVI Raw or Image Sequences and load into Avidemux, add the audio via a mixdown in Blender and mux / encode out in Avidemux, if it’s video I usually add an MSharpen filter, adjust levels and colourmatrix etc if going to DVD, there’s presets too for ipod maybe able to tweak to suit iPad.
Not a workaround just a better workflow I find.
Apologies first, I didnt read all, but for customers I regularily have to send previews to iPhone/iPad.
I export from Blender as image sequence or uncompressed avi.
I am with yellow. For production I export as image sequence anyways so it just fits in the workflow.
Afterwards I use XMediaRecode.
Homepage:
http://www.xmedia-recode.de/download.html
Direct Download
http://www.xmedia-recode.de/download/XMediaRecode2258_setup.exe
Barely known international because its a german page, the tool´s english though.
It recodes basically everything to anything with simple drag’n’drop and got presets for iPad, iPhone, PSP and god knows what.
And the best, it is free =)
I quit creating videos specifically for my iPod Touch when I discoevred AirVideo a few months ago. It uses a custom ffmpeg build to convert virtually any video to a streaming format and send it directly to the device from the streaming server in my basement. Quality is good and the server runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The app costs $2.99. If there is some file that I want to actually put on my device, AirVideo has an offline conversion function that create a compatible file that can be synced via iTunes.
Awesome…
Cheers guys. I’ll give those a go.