[MEncoder-users] avi h264 to mp4 (without transcoding)

[Phil Sturges]

Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 <at> gmail.com> 
> I doubt you need to demux the audio before converting it. You can put
> the audio in a container during the conversion too.
According to the mp4box documentation direct importing of h264 in avi
containers is not supported. That has been my experience also.  Is your
suggestion here to create a file video.m4a instead of video.aac?
> -nodrop is probably not a good idea unless MP4Box is giving you better
> results than without it. BTW, MP4Box's default framerate is 25, so can
> you omit the option if you want.
Nodrop does seem to have some positive effect on audio sync, although
not completely fixing it. Quite true about 25fps. Interestingly, I had been
using the default build of mp4box from the ubuntu repositories and this
seemed to be the behavior. Last night I downloaded the latest build deb
from the gpac website and now I can't even force it to 25fps. It keeps
 reverting to 29.970 even when I explicitly specify 25fps. I have made a
 post about this on the sourceforge forum about this and awaiting a reply. 
> Also, MP4 doesn't support AC3. MP4Box may accept it, but it will be put
> in a private stream (you can put pretty much anything in a private
> stream). I have no idea how many players will even attempt to play AC3
> this way. If you want to use that AC3 stream, your best bet is likely a
> Matroska container. You could also use MPEG-TS.
> 
The purpose of this little project is to allow playback on iPads and other
iOS devices whilst maintaining the ac3 surround sound for playback on
my home theatre systems via xbmc. So mp4 is my only option. Any new
 videos I now encode with handbrake which allows the h264,aac and 
ac3 streams in the mp4 container. This works great for my purposes, so 
whether or not or how it is supported doesn't matter too much to me as
 long as I can get to work, and at this stage it "works", 
just having audio sync issues. 
Cheers
Phil