Comments on: Sapphire Browser Beta 4.1 Release Notes

By: gbooker

gbooker — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:03:00 +0000

> Does creating a .mov keep all the aspect of an .mkv file ? (Chapters, anisotropic ratio and Surround) while getting rid of the â€œstreamingâ€ issue ?
Yes. Everything that perian supports in mkv is supported by mov. It really creates a mov file in memory when importing an mkv.
Frontrow and QT don’t exactly play the same way. Just look at the perian bug reports to confirm this.
As far as converting files from mkv to mov, simply open the file, wait for the import, and hit save. It will ask you to save as a reference or self-contained. Reference movies are smaller (about 2MB), but still require the existence of the original mkv. Self-contained movies are actually slightly smaller than the mkv itself (mov is a more efficient format).

By: Francky

Francky — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:46:03 +0000

Well scratch that first comment, strangely enough, I’m was playing a file on my mac pro and the click and pops are happening, even though I never fiddle with this one to get surround ?!

When playing those file before in front row, this doesn’t happen. I always assumed Quicktime and Front Row would play a file the same way.

Tried to convert a file on the Mac pro instead of the Mac mini… 20 minutes instead of 2 hours, DAMN I Guess I’ll be doing it this way from now on

By: Francky

Francky — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:32:01 +0000

Hey Graham, thats what I imagined was happening with the A52Codec, but strangely, before enabling passtthrough in the codec, AC3 files simply played in Stereo. Once Sapphire runs and reverts my setting back to “default”, instead of just stereo, I get Huge POPS and Clicks… so I’m guessing its reverting something back to a value that isn’t right. If I turn off PassThrough in Sapphire and set back all the tweak to always have surround, the problem goes away…

What is the advantage of using .mov files instead of .mkv ? As .mkv seem fine except for the “streaming thing it does for a bit. If .mp4 or .m4v supported AC3 it would be the perfect format. I can only hope Apple fixes that eventually. Does creating a .mov keep all the aspect of an .mkv file ? (Chapters, anisotropic ratio and Surround) while getting rid of the “streaming” issue ?

Thanks

By: gbooker

gbooker — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:30:56 +0000

Francky, “Robot Chicken” was a known issue, and has been handled for the next release. VIDEO_TS should be possible with the DVD Playback framework at some point (someone with expertise on this around?).

AC3 passthrough is turned off when Sapphire is done with it because that is the developer’s suggested operation for the A52Codec. It should work while within Sapphire.

BTW, since MKV files are designed to work in a way that is completely incompatible with QuickTime’s operation, I convert all mine to .mov files (lossless conversion). Sapphire can do this for you through its join interface. See http://appletv.nanopi.net/manual/advanced/ for more info.

By: Francky

Francky — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:01:20 +0000

Well I simply converted all my Video_TS folders to surround MKV files, and then used a couple of tools to also add the chapters to then, so I didn’t need Video_TS anymore and gained a ton of more space The only thing I didn’t like about MVK files was that front row couldn’t show Previews from them… but Sapphire fixed that

A thing I did noticed though, I had enabled surround on my system (thanks to a couple of tweaks) But Sapphire actually screws it up when the surround option is on, my guess is that when you exit front row it reverts the setting back to “default”.