Nicer Batch Encoding with HandBrake

May 22, 2008 at 12:56 am · Filed under Mac OS X, computers, iPod / iPhone, open source, television

A while ago I posted a script for driving HandBrakeCLI. But it was lame that I had two not-quite-identical versions of the script — one for iPhone output and another for Apple TV. At a guess, Brian Beardmore only needed one type. Now that we watch movies on the Apple TV and I watch on the iPhone, it was silly to have two different scripts. So I added simple argument processing.

hb.sh v1.0.3

If there first argument is iphone, then hb.sh optimizes for iPhone. If the argument is appletv or there are no arguments, hb.sh optimizes for Apple TV. It’s very easy to tweak or add your own types — just look for myArgs in the script and add or adjust as desired. I run this script on my Linux server, which has lots of disk space and is generally idle.

On my MacBook Pro, I have a couple aliases to facilitate things. I copy DVD folders to ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/input and run one of these. When done, the script opens up ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/. I move the DVD folders out of input and the processed .m4v video out of output; then I drop the .m4v files onto iTunes’ LIBRARY area (so it doesn’t stop whatever it’s currently playing) and check iPhone videos to sync to the iPhone (the Apple TV has plenty of space, so everything syncs to it). Note that these lines may be too wide to display properly in WordPress — just Copy and Paste, and you’ll get the full text.

alias hbatv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh appletv; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias hbip="ssh  -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh iphone;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Note that inspectore is the name of my Linux server. This would work just as well with HandBrakeCLI on a Mac “server” — or even Windows, if you set it up to accept remote commands (CygWin, anyone?).

Reminder: You must adjust the inputSearchDir and outputDir paths for the running HandBrakeCLI.

pepper@inspector:~$ egrep tivo bin/hb.sh
inputSearchDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/input"
outputDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/output"

In the future version I’d like to support for arbitrary HandBrakeCLI arguments on the hb.sh command line, but I first have to see if HandBrakeCLI can handle gracefully conflicting arguments from built-ins and the command line.

3 Comments »

  1. voiphype said,

    June 4, 2008 at 2:01 am

    Thanks for sharing! I’ll do try to see if I can get to work w/ CygWin

  2. ebb said,

    August 17, 2008 at 12:10 pm

    FYI, the [[...]] conditional construct you are using is a bashism–it won’t work with other versions of sh. I discovered this as it appears that Ubuntu’s default /bin/sh is not bash.

    The easy fix, if you have /bin/bash, is just to change the first line to:

    #!/bin/bash

  3. reppep said,

    August 17, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    ebb,

    I changed the shebang line in my private copy; if I ever post a newer version, that will be included up.

    Thanks

RSS feed for comments on this post

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.