Converting Anime to Your iPhone / iPod Touch32

The tutorial here will not update in the future. Snow has updated this tutorial. Read more on his new blog here. If you have any questions regarding the tutorial, make sure you leave comments on his blog.

Latest update – 23 June 2010

Hey everyone, don’t you sometimes just want to bring your anime on the road and watch it in the bus or train but haven’t figured out how they can convert it properly. Here is a guide to help you convert a .mkv file to a mp4 file which is compatible on the iPhone / iPod touch and might even be compatible on other iDevices and possible the PSP or any other device supporting H.264 video. This will include softsubtitles. I haven’t tested the PSP yet but when I get my hands on one I’ll see if it works.

You can probably convert any video format to an mp4, just follow the guide and instead of the .mkv file use the file you have, like .rmvb. However it could be that you can’t add soft subtitles, if you can’t enable or disable your subtitles while watching it than you have a hardsubbed video, therefore just skip the steps with the softsubs.

Be warned though, I tried to make this guide as beginner friendly (not noob friendly, you have to have some IQ) as it can be however there are a lot of steps involved so don’t freak out and re-read some parts to understand it better. The first few times might go a little slow but once you get used to it, you’ll be converting the anime like lightening.
It can be very frustrating, I’ve been trying to figure out how this work for a day now and I just got it to work.

Working formats: .mkv ; .rmvb ; .avi ; .mp4

Note: Firmware of your device might play a role if you can’t play or even sync this to your device. I’m using the latest firmware 3.1.3 for iPhone/iPod Touch. Read the bottom of this page first starting from (*1) till audio because you might want to know that beforehand.

Things you need:

• MeGUI
• Avisynth
• .NET framework ( 2.0 is what you at least need but update to 3.5 just to be sure)
• NeroAacEnc
• Codecs [ K-Lite (has the latest audio and video codecs) ] – get the mega pack just to be sure
• Patience

Optional:

• mkv demux-all or mkvtoolnix with MKVextractGUI ( download the pack, see below,  for laziness’ sake )
• subtitle workshop
• BeHappy – This can be used to convert your audio if you notice that it’s incompatible with MeGUI. See Audio below.

Packs:

• Demux training pack v2 – Download that file if you want to practice demuxing and encoding on a 10mb file before handling bigger files. It including mkvtoolnix with MKVextractGUI and an OVA of K-ON!. Good luck! (Replaced RAW AAC with .m4a for easier demuxing and converting. )

Steps:

1. Start off by installing everything and have the NeroAacEnc downloaded, you may skip the optional part.
2. The first time that you start MeGUI it will ask you to update, go and let it update. ( If you haven’t installed Avisynth it will also ask you to install that )
3. When you’re done updating, in MeGUI press ctrl+s > external program settings > and at NeroAACEnc press [...] >select NeroAacEnc.
4. Check under the ‘input tab’ and than ‘Encoder settings’ to see if you have an x264: iPhone/iPod Touch setting. If you do have it proceed to step 6 if not go to step 5.
5. If you don’t have the iPhone encoder setting press ‘ctrl+U’ and on the left side select ‘Profile collections’, on the right side; right click on Tx264 and ‘Force (Re)install’ do this for “STAudio” too and press update. You will be prompted with a screen full of profiles you can select the preset to import. I recommend you to use “standard iPod/iPhone” as this will not create large file sizes and the quality is fair but it’s up to you, go ahead and experiment with it. As for the audio you have to pick “Nero AAC iPod good or high”
6. Now we can finally start to encode something, on the main screen press “ctrl+R” and at “Video input ” press the [...] button and select the video file you want to encode. The video will pop up, just close it.
7. Resize it to your device’s resolution, for an iPod touch/iPhone it’s 480×320. Tick “resize” and tick “Suggest resolution (mod16)”; this keeps the aspect ratio, for 16:9 you’ll get 480×272 (most likely). Press [Save] at the lower right corner.
8. The “Avisynth script” and “video output” should’ve been filled in, now select the encoder setting, for example iPhone – Standard, at the drowndown menu . Press [Config], change the AVC profiles on the right from Main to Baseline profile.
9. Tick “Advanced settings at the middle of the main tab. This will show you more tabs, go to the Misc tab and remove the text “–vbv-bufsize 10000 –vbv-maxrate 10000 –profile main –level 3″ in the custom command line.
10. Press [Ok] and it will prompt you to save the profile or not, it doesn’t really matter but I recommend you to press [Yes] if you want it for later use and don’t want to repeat the steps.
11. Now it’s time to insert audio, at the main screen, to the right of “Audio input” press the [...] button and select the audio track you wish to import, you can just select the .MKV as source file, it works perfectly fine with K-Lite mega pack installed. see (*1) & (Audio) if you don’t get it to work
    
12. At the encoder setting, select Nero AAC iPod good or high.
13. At the extension select mp4-aac
14. Press [Config] and check if the AAC profile is set to “AAC-LC” and I recommend the bitrate to be “adaptive bitrate @ 128kbit/s, if you desire so, you can set it higher and press [Ok]
15. Press [Auto encode] at the lower right corner.
16. The container should be mp4 and the device should be the device you’re encoding for. Size and bitrate should be { No target size }
17. If you want to add soft subtitles read on if you don’t want soft subtitles press [queue] and go to step 21 (*2)
18. Check ” add additional content” and press [Queue]
19. At subtitle 1 press [...] and select the subtitle file. The annoying thing is that this doesn’t support .ass subtitles (*2) so you have to convert that to .srt subs. Set the language and name. Make sure that the container stays mp4 and not MKV or M2TS.
20. Select the device type again and press [Go]
21. Now go to the “Queue” tab and press [start] at the lower left corner
22. Put the output file onto your device and enjoy your anime on the road =).

(*1) You could select the mkv source file and use that as audio source but it might not work so you have to demux the mkv file first to get the audio. Usually it has .ac3 or .aac audio. If it doesn’t work it means that MeGUI doesn’t support that audio and you have to convert it, see Audio below on how to.

(*2) You have to demux the mkv file to get the subtitle file, the subtitle file could be .ass or some other format but so far only .srt worked. You can use subtitle workshop to convert .ass to .srt ( Subrip in the dropdown menu) , open the subtitle file and save as .srt ;;  .ass subtitles don’t want to be integrated into a mp4 container but if you have a device that reads mkv it should be fine if you use .ass.

Demuxing:To demux your .mkv container just install MKV demux all then drag your mkv onto the program and press demux.You will get multiple files including subs, audio and video. You can then use those files to convert it into a mp4 file. If you use MKVtoolnix instead (which I recommened) just open MKVextractGUI.exe and choose the source, tick the files you want to demux and start demuxing.

Audio: There are certain MKV files that have audio which isn’t supported by MeGUI, this is due the lack of codecs on your machine. Try K-Lite first instead of thissince it contains all the codecs you will probably need. What you have to do is to convert that audio file to a file that MeGUI can read e.g. .ac3/.mp3/.m4a ( there are probably more but I haven’t tested everything as of yet)

1. Download BeHappy
2. Extract
3. Copy the plugins from the BeHappy folder to the plugins folder at ..\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins
4. Copy NeroAacEnc.exe to the encoders folder in BeHappy
5. Start the program
6. At [1] choose BassAudio and select your source
7. Skip [2] and put disable at [3], you don’t really have to tinker with the setting unless you want to.
8. At [4] select NeroDigital AAC from the dropdown menu (You may configure it if you want)
9. Choose your destination and save as .m4a not .mp4
10. Use the .m4a file as audio source in MeGUI, when you press encode do not overwrite.