Down the IT Rabbit Hole

Handbrake seems to have an issue with DTS 4.0 encoded audio (at least on the Edward Scissorhands Blu-Ray). After the conversion I noticed the right audio channel not mapped properly during conversion which had sound effects but no audio coming from the right speaker. My target for the audio from Handbrake is generally AAC@160kbps with a Pro Logic 2 Mixdown and a second track for AC3 @ 640kbps with a Pro Logic 2 Mixdown as well (I would have 6 channel discrete but this is a 4 channel track only). To fix this there are a couple of ways, but on MacOS there is actually a solution. Download the ffmpeg command line from  http://ffmpegmac.net  (ffmpegx has issues with multi channel audio and is not maintained). Run the command line: ffmpeg -i INPUT.mkv -acodec ac3 -ac 4 -ar 48000 -ab 640k OUTPUT.ac3 Use mkvtools to add the audio track to the original MKV file. Open the MKV using Handbrake and choose the new AC3 audio track instead of the DTS one. After conversion, ...

I recently came upon a video that was way, way too dark. Unfortunately Handbrake does not have any brightness/contrast/gamma corrections. So I played the video in VLC and used the Extended Controls to increase the gamma slightly. As far as I can tell, the slider is from 0 - 10 with 1.0 being the default. So my solution is to transcode the video with VLC at a high bitrate (the source video bitrate was about 22Mbps I believe) at about 15Mbps, mux the audio back in, and then re-encode with Handbrake with my preset. This is the command line I used with VLC: /Applications/Video/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC Source.m4v --intf=rc --sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=15000,gamma=1.3}:standard{mux=mp4,dst=Dest.mp4,access=file}" Edit: In the end I found that this wouldn't really work too well, so I used avidemux2 with a gamma filter, encoded at the highest possible bitrate, then used Subler to remux the audio and chapter tracks, then ran it through handbrake for my HD settings.

For a couple of years I have been trying to find a way to take a subtitle track from a DVD or Blu-Ray (which are usually burned images as opposed to text data) and convert it into a text subtitle track that then can be inserted into a m4v or other video format. There were (in my view) only a couple of options. 1) D-Subtitler. - Problem, it's PowerPC only, not Intel 2) Avidemux. - Problem, it doesn't use OCR text recognition therefore almost each character has to be input manually -- and it does a bad job with Blu-Ray subtitles (you have to scale them down via BDSup2Sub and Avidemux has a hard time recognizing glyphs of the same character). 3) Run VMWare/Parallels in order to run a windows program to OCR the subtitles into a .srt. Yesterday I stumbled upon Subtitle Edit made by Nikolaj Olsson. It is a very good (and open source) .NET app to OCR subtitles (it actually uses either Tesseract or Microsoft Office Document Imaging) for the OCR and spellchecking (using Microsoft...