[MacDV] Video conversion suggestions for iPad2

[Conlon Brett]

Hiya,

Here's a legitimate question to drown out all the recent SPAM flooding the forum. :)

I'm looking for your suggestions on what are some good settings I should use when converting my recordings to video files for watching on my iPad.

Here's some facts:

The recorder is a PVR (Topfield 2400) and it captures video streams as raw files (no conversions).

I clean them up in MPEG Streamclip (Start/finish/ads) and then save them as TS so that there is no re-encoding of files. I can then watch these on my telly through my Topfield.

Now I want to convert a bunch of them to view on my iPad2.

I've tried HandBrake but the video files show all sort of wierdness then seem to lock up the Video app on the iPad, then it unexpectedly quits.

I've tried using MPEG Streamclip and the results are pretty good but the file sizes are sometimes twice as big as the original.

For example, a 2 minute test sample I'm playing with is about 50MB as a .ts file. When I process it as a Quicktime file with the following settings it becomes 91MB:
Quality = 70%
Compression = H.264
Sound = MPEG-4 AAC (192kbps)
Frame Size = 1024x576 (16:9)
Deinterlace = ON

If the quality is set to 50% (the default value) the file size is 40MB but the video quality is distractingly poor in detailed or fast-moving scenes.

Does anyone have any good suggestions or even alternative (Mac) solutions for easily/quickly converting video files for their iPad.

Do any of the Roxio products work well for their cost?

Thanks a bunch!

Cojcolds

BTW, is there a good short file out there that can be downloaded which is good for encoding testing, ie. it has some motion, fine detail, gradual gradients etc?