Batch convert 10-bit to 8-bit?
 

Regardless of the merits of 10-bit, it does have much higher requirements for playback, which limits the devices on which it will work... so I've been running into the issue of wanting to play fansubs on one such "lower power" device (in this case, an ipad 3, which is still pretty powerful) but it can't do it.

So... What's a good tool for getting these files into a more universal format?

Hardsubbed is a pretty good way to go for portable multimedia devices like tablets, tho the quality isn't anywhere near as good video wise. Mp4 format or even the old avi format.

As for conversion tools there are lots out there, but in terms of simplicity converting 10 bit to 8 bit hardsub handbrake is pretty good.

Again though, you'll be getting a decrease in video quality....

The problem with 10bit H.264 is generally a problem of the hardware decoder manufacturers not wanting to pour money into something that is very much niche in their opinion (they generally tend to be very stingy on the ASICs anyways). This will most probably continue in the future as well, as HEVC/H.265 already has people wanting to add "best-effort" decoding clauses (link) to the new standard. And then there's just the problem that ARM isn't exactly as powerful per-clock when compared to "traditional" IA32/x86_64 hardware.

Handbrake is indeed probably one of the best GUI encoders around, but I haven't checked its hardsubbing capabilities as of late. If they're fine, then it and its command line interface of course are quite usable.

Another example I'd like to bring on the table is actually mpv, the latest in the line of mplayer forks (mplayer2 has more or less died out, most of its developers having moved to mpv). Windows builds are being built by lachs0r and provided here. It also contains the encoding capabilities coded by divVerent, the documentation for which are here. Only problem is that it currently cannot do (at least according to the documentation) stream copying of the audio if you wanted to do that.

And some general hints that apply to both pieces of software:

You will want most probably to use a fast x264 preset ('superfast' or 'fast'; both handbrake and mpv should let you set one), and a CRF value that you deem as a good compromise between your eyes and how much it takes space. Start with 23 and go down if it looks bad on the device, or up if it looks good. The highest number that still looks good enough is what you'll be using.

Everything since the (iPhone) 3GS in the Apple sphere supports high profile and level 4.1, so that should not you limit much if at all. If you are encoding for some other devices as well, you might want to see their limitations regarding profile and level, and modify your settings accordingly.

So now I should start replacing my mplayer2 builds with mpv? Are these guys going to settle down someplace for a while?

I'm building a git clone now on my Kubuntu 13.10 machine. We'll see how it goes.

Since mplayer2 is more or less abandoned even by its initiator (last commit was around 6 months ago), at this point I really don't see any reason to stay around it in general.

And yeah, it's really unfortunate that somewhere late last year there had to be another forking for us to get a somewhat sanely developed mplayer fork. That said, cracks in mplayer2 started to arise as far back as around 2011, as we saw a person ready to contribute significant amounts of code ragequit. I, and probably some other people as well, hoped that it would become better. Unfortunately, it really didn't. Thus mpv was born.

As far as current stability goes, so far I do not see any reason for why there would be another forking. Contributions are being taken in a relatively sane way, and I don't see similar problems popping up as with mplayer2, at least at the moment. So far it looks like mpv could actually be a project that would only be forked (in the sense of some other project 'trying to pass the torch further') if it ever loses all of its current contributors.

Clone works fine from the command prompt, but smplayer wants to send it a "-noquiet" mplayer switch which mpv complains about. I posted a comment over in rvm's smplayer forum, but it hasn't been approved yet. I cannot see how to disable specific mplayer switches in smplayer, only add them from the GUI.

I took a shot at converting a H10P show to the basic iPhone profile with the newest Handbrake from John Stebbins Ubuntu repository. Didn't work out too well, but I didn't try too hard, either.

I think mpv removed certain features related to how smplayer and possibly other GUIs used mplayer/mplayer2. I didn't mention that part as this thread was started about batch conversion of things, not playback :) .

If you built mpv with the OSC (on-screen controls), that should already provide some kind of a visual interface in addition to the usual key bindings. If that's not enough, you will have to utilize mplayer2 until a GUI for mpv appears.

Tried the newest Windows version right now, and it seems to have worked just fine (as far as the output stream looks like). Loved the fact how they don't even show you the advanced x264 options any more in the interface unless you check a checkbox, just like it should be (Handbrake for the longest time didn't support x264's internal presets and tunes). Most users shouldn't really concern themselves with anything else but what's on the Video tab :) .

Sorry to go off topic, but you're a pretty informed source about these things, JEEB. I had an exchange with rvm about SMPlayer support for mpv after this thread began. He doesn't think it's possible because of the wide variety of changes to the switches and changes to the "slave" mode as well.

I've used Handbrake before. This is the first time I tried writing to one of the stock iOS formats since I don't use any Apple devices. My guess is I just needed to do some tweaking of the available codecs.

autohardsubber-r4fsmodb
http://task-force.lacumpa.biz/?p=798

It's literally the easiest option.

Drag and drop the .mkv to the .bat file and watch it get convert to .mp4
It hardsubs the file and keeps the font styling. Quality is retained in mkv--->mp4 conversion but bigger file size in end result.

Thanks. I'll give it a shot.

after extraction...

drag the 10-bit .mkv to:

\autohardsubber-r4fsmodb\programs\consolemulti.bat