As you might know the AppleTV is very limited in HD playback. According to Apple it supports MPEG4 H.264 Low Complexity 1280x720 at 24fps. Anything beyond that won't play.

So if you took a HD Video with your own camera or you got a MKV, AVI file with HD content you need to convert this to 1280x720 at 24fps. I'll take a look a two scenarios:

1. The HD-Video is already edited etc. and just needs to be converted (or better transcoded) for the AppleTV
2. You are editing the file in iMovie and you need to export it after you have finished editing. (coming soon in Part 2)
   

Converting HD-Video for AppleTV

If you already have a completed Video file, you just need to convert it. The easiest tool for this is probably Handbrake. Handbrake is free and available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu-Linux. For other Linux distributions there is only a command-line version of Handbrake available.

• Open the file in Handbrake.
• If you use Handbrake for the first time better choose the Menu item Presets/Update Built-In Presets once.
  
• Choose the template AppleTV. If you can't see this, click on Toggle Presets.
  
• This chooses the settings to create a Standard definition (SD) Video. It keeps the AC3 Audio if it exists and adds a second Audio Track with a stereo down-mixed Dolby Surround Pro II soundtrack.

• Choose Video and click on Picture Settings.
  
• At the top right corner click on Anamorphic and select None.
• Change the Video size with the arrows to 1280 x 720. If the video has a different Aspect ratio than 16:9 increase the values until the width is 1280 or the height is 720.
• Click Close to close the Video Window.
  
• Click Start  to start the encoding process. This will take a long time. On my iMac 2.4GHz it encodes an average of about 7fps. So for a 2 hour Movie this will take about 6-7 hours.
  
• You can try to adjust the different Video/Audio settings of Handbrake but I found the default settings work quite well.
• Unfortunately I had some Videos that made Handbrake crash. I am not sure why, maybe there was a glitch in the HD broadcast. Once I tried the same file again and it worked the second time.

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