Download Subler, unzip into your Applications folder and launch Subler. It uses a friendly drag and drop paradigm. It will not only rewrap, and not transcode, the video to a friendly format, it will transcode the audio from AC-3 to AAC if necessary, and it will optimize the location of the mpeg-4 atom in the resulting file for iTunes friendly use. Subler is a utility designed specifically for encoding subtitles, but it also will do exactly what you need it to do in this case. There's no telling where ffmpeg placed it, but likely its in the same place whomever encoded the original mkv left it. but is definitely better about playing unoptimized video. iTunes and iOS media player are very finicky about decoding video if the mp4 atom is in a place it doesn't like, namely, anywhere except near the beginning of the file. What you need to do is transcode the audio to AAC when you run that ffmpeg command like this: ffmpeg -loglevel panic -i 'original.mkv' -vcodec copy -c:a aac -strict -2 -ab 160k -ac 2 -ar 48k .audio.in.acc.mp4įfmpeg is a wonderful and fast utility, but it does not care that you are an iTunes user. If the audio in the mkv file was AC-3 and you merely rewrapped it in an mp4 container, it will still have AC-3 encoding on the audio. Quicktime will play the AAC and AC-3 formats, but iTunes and iOS media player will not. In my experience, about half the time mkv files are encoded with AAC audio, and half the time with AC-3, and yes this matters. VLC and XMBC are both worthy alternatives they both handle a wide range of video formats. If you wish to avoid re-encoding to gain iTunes support, consider looking for alternatives to iTunes.

mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 384k -strict -2. This questions suggests a slightly different set of flags for ffmpeg to gain iTunes support, Convert a bunch of MKV files to MP4 to read them in iTunes. It is highly likely you will need to re-encode the movie, as suggested in MP4 movie does play in QuickTime but not in iTunes, if you want iTunes for playback. Have you confirmed the movie's encoding using the Finder's Get Info panel? You may have a valid MPEG-4 container but the contents are not natively supported without conversion. Where possible legacy formats are converted on opening. With OS X 10.9, Apple dropped native support for many video formats and containers. It is likely the movie is not in an ideal format for QuickTime Player on OS X 10.9, thus the conversion. This would explain why it can play the file but not QuickLook or iTunes. QuickTime Player may be swiftly converting the file on opening using OS X's new AVFoundation.

How to play an mp4 file on mac