So, for some time now I have been using my own custom HandBrake settings when encoding for the AppleTV. I have two eSata modded AppleTV’s and by and large these HandBrake settings have been stellar. They have also been used by other HandBrake testers and fervent users on stock AppleTv’s with much success. So I figured I would post them here now.

Having said that though, I suggest these settings be used with one of the snapshots posted on the HandBrake forums. HandBrake 0.9.3 is almost a year old and the current HandBrake snapshots produce much smaller files with better quality than the older 0.9.3 public release.

1. To start, pick the Apple > AppleTV preset in HandBrake which is built in.

2. Instead of the built in presets constant quality of RF 20, slide the slider up so you get RF 19.25 ( RF goes lower as your quality gets higher, much like in golf ). One word of warning: constant quality is determined based on the source file. 19.25 is proven for SD DVD. Now if you are doing HD sources like say a 720P or 1080p mkv or whatever, then try more like RF 23 or so as 19.25 on HD sources will give you a pretty high bitrate depending on the source file.

3. Click on the Advanced panel and paste this string into the ” Advanced Options String ” textbox at the bottom (note the crappy code box.. gotta work on it but functions just fine):

ref=3:mixed-refs=1:bframes=3:me=hex:subq=7:b-adapt=2:8x8dct=1:weightb=0:trellis=0:weightp=0

Thats about it.

You should find that you’re encodes are smaller, and the quality higher than the built in HandBrake preset.

newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk2s4: partition size not a multiple of 4K.

accompanied by a failure to properly format the media partition error which is typically seen on drives > 500GB (though may be experienced on smaller drives depending on firmware). You will notice a checkbox next to the “Prepare New Drive” Button for “Large Drive Formatting” ( sue me, I didn’t know what else to call it ). This uses an alternate method of drive formatting which cures my problem child and has worked on a couple other drives with this issue. The caveat is that it creates a media partition approximately 300 mb smaller than the standard AtvCloner method due to diskutil creating 128 mb of free space before and after the media partition. On the other hand it works ( so far ) for those problem drives. I will try to elaborate more later. You can get AtvCloner 0.1.4b here.

Of the six or so drives I have tested and used AtvCloner on, one drive is indeed my problem child. My Western Digital 750GB Studio Edition external triple interface drive has never worked quite right when attached to my atv whether using the old manual command line method or using AtvCloner. Now AtvCloner actually uses the same system utilities that the command line uses so it makes sense that the problem exists with either method. This issue has been experienced by others, I also heard about it in a response to
my eSata AppleTV Mod on the HandBrake forums.

The issue is that the last step of formatting the Media partition in hfs+ and the volume name “Media” fails with this error (note, it shows up manually in terminal with that method as well as in the activity window in AtvCloner) :

newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk2s4: partition size not a multiple of 4K.

which means that step has failed. This results in a diskutil list like this:

/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *698.6 Gi   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         34.0 Mi    disk2s1
   2:             Apple_Recovery                         400.0 Mi   disk2s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS OSBoot                  900.0 Mi   disk2s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS                         697.3 Gi   disk2s4

Note that partition index 4 is indeed Apple_HFS but is not correctly named “Media”. The resulting behavior when attached to the Atv is that the drive boots up just fine, works fine and in fact can update its atv software just fine, however a Factory Restore will fail. I have run this drive just fine, but it bugs me that it’s “not quite right” so using a bit of google-fu I found a few items of interest that point to the problem, however nothing as a workaround yet for these problem drives.

Update: A new version of AtvCloner is in testing, it seems to fix this problem as I have successfully restored my problem child and updated it successfully. Its a bit of a kludge but works. More to come …..

This minor update just adds “AtvCloner Website” and “AtvCloner User Guide” to the help menu so you can access these resources from within the app. See the change log to review changes.

The guide is here but be sure to read the main AtvCloner page if you haven’t and intend to use it since it has a few things about it which are not in the user guide. As well I figured I should post a change log to help keep track of what I changed from rev to rev, even if it’s only for my own benefit.

Note: You can also access any pages via the pages bar at the top of the site.

Now, I have had good success with it on five different drives on a vanilla install of 10.5.7 Mac OSX Leopard but I make no warranties it will work for you. However, feel free to give it a try and if it works drop me a line. Be sure to read the guarantee part because like anything free … there isn’t one of any sort.

Currently it is at version 0.1.1 which of course indicates it isn’t even alpha yet (and maybe never will be). Hopefully it works for you and saves a lot of headache.

Cheers.