Convert H.264 Quicktime to PS3

My Playstation 3 is the nexus of my home theater, largly because of how flexible it is in playing back various media formats. But the one format it won't play is the one I (sadly) work with most often: Quicktime .mov files.

Many Quicktime movies are encoded with H.264 for the video and AAC for audio. The PS3 eats these formats for breakfast, but only when they are wrapped in an MPEG-4 .m4v file. So I figured there must be a way to convert an H.264 Quikctime to .mv4 without re-encoding. Google did turn up a solution, but it was hard enough to find that I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else can use it.

Open your .mov file in Quicktime Pro (I presume you need Pro for this, although maybe not for long — anyway, if you have Final Cut Studio, you have Quicktime Pro). Select File >Export. In the resultant save dialog, select MPEG-4.

Then click on Options. Under the Video tab, select MP4 at the top, and for Video Format: Pass through.

For Audio, the settings are also that simple: Pass through.

Click OK and wait. The process is fairly speedy, since ostensibly no re-encoding is happening. The result will be a file with a .m4v extension that should be almost exactly the same size as your original Quicktime movie. Sneakernet it over to your PS3 on a thumbdrive and enjoy.

I've been doing this to preview my edits and color correction work on the Stunt People short (I revealed the title today on Twitter), but it also works great for movie trailers downloaded from Apple.