Note: With the June 2014 release of iBooks Author, the procedures discussed here no longer work. Good luck with your iBooks Author encodes.
Adding video to an iBook is simple; just drag the clip into your book in iBooks Author. But if iBooks Author “optimizes” the video you inserted, it’s encoding it again and potentially boosting the data rate far beyond what’s necessary for most videos. This makes your book larger than necessary, which can negatively impact sales and usage.
In this 30-minute webinar, you’ll learn how to encode your videos so that iBooks Author doesn’t “optimize” them. By using these techniques, you’ll be able to choose the data rate, resolution and file size for your videos, rather than iBooks Author. Specifically, you will learn:
— What happens when iBooks Author “optimizes” your files
— How to encode videos so that iBooks Author does not optimize them
— How to create presets in programs like Handbrake, Squeeze and Adobe Media Encoder that produce videos that iBooks Author doesn’t optimize
The webinar will also explore how to use HandBrake’s CQ mode to dramatically reduce the file size of your videos (particularly screencams) while retaining excellent quality, and again, avoiding optimization. By using this x.264 encoding mode (also available in Squeeze) and the other lessons learned in this webinar, you’ll be able to include more minutes of videos in your iBooks, or the same number of minutes in a much smaller footprint.
To register for the webinar, click here.