How do I encode chapters into quicktime movies?

[Lt Major Burns]

how do i encode chapters into quicktime movies? i'm currently backing up my dvd library onto my HDD, in h.264. the movie files are cumbersome to navigate around, being a 3hour movie and one slider.

the apple sample movie for imovie/idvd "our first snowman.mov" (spotlight it) has 5 named chapters encoded into it.

how?

 

[Lt Major Burns]

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/chaptertracks.html

is there way to automatically do this from an app, from the DVD? Star wars has more than 50 chapters

 

[fryke]

What do you use to rip the DVDs, anyway? Handbreak? AFAIK that doesn't offer such functionality. It let's you rip the chapters one by one, but that's not what you want, either.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

Handbrake[sic ], yes. you have a large ripped moive library, AFAIK, how do you manage it? i mean, what do you find is most effective to handle, sort and/or play the movies?

 

[fryke]

Oh, yes, was a bit tired, sorry. (about the 'handbreak', I meant...)

I have them all on an external drive. Either as MPEG-4 or H.264, some are XviD, too. I've made sections (comedy, action, drama, sci-fi, horror etc.) and if a movie goes into two sections (i.e. is comedy AND sci-fi, like 'spaceballs'), i put it into one and create an alias to it in the other section. I'm putting comments into the "Spotlight comment field" and hope that Apple will never change that system so my comments survive...

I watch them with VLC exclusively, since that's the only app that plays them all correctly, but also because Cmd-Opt-Shift-RightArrow jumps five minutes, which lets me scan movies quickly.

I'm not much into "chapters", since I usually watch the whole movies, anyway. What I _would_ like is a nice, FrontRow like interface to VLC. But then again, the Finder's not too bad.