A file with the m4v extension is basically an mp4 file- renamed by Apple. An MP4 file is what is called a container.  A container is what allows you to combine different multimedia streams (mostly audio and video) into ONE single file. If you open a M4V file in a regular, non-video iPod its going to find the AAC audio track and just play the audio?.if you open that same M4V file using a video iPod, both the audio AND the video parts of that file will open up for your viewing and listening pleasure unless you specify otherwise.

Yamb is free software that will extract the audio and video files for individual use.

Yamb is also able to extract some Audios and Videos streams from several containers but also chapters ans subtitles. This task is put together in Extract Tab. In order to facilitate extraction, there is one part for information allowing to visualize what kind of streams are included in your input file. Considering that mp4box is more oriented to mp4 and 3gp formats, you should have more informations with this kind of file than avi file by example.

Download it from this link and follow these instructions on extracting the individual files within the .m4v container:

The first step is to load your input file [1]. Yamb can receive avi, mp4, m4v and cmp files for this feature but also ogg, qcp and 3gp. Here is a snapshoot with a mp4 file :

According to the kind of input file and the different streams that you have, Yamb enables/disables automatically some options here. In the picture, you can see that "Extract Video/Audio from AVI files" option is disabled.

An other important thing here is the panel to have some informations about our input file. You can choose 2 types of infos [2]. Either a global manner (Global), or infos by tracks (by Tracks). With this option, only tracks are remained having a duration greater than 1s or 1ms. You can select the track number with the drop down list. Actually, we speak about number tracks here but this corresponds to the real id for each track. mp4box works mainly with this ids concerning mp4 and 3gp files.

So by choosing this id in the bottom part, you must find also in the lines what kind of type do you have for your track. For a video stream, you should have "vide" type. For audio stream, the title will be "soun", for subtitles this will be "tx3g" and for chapters, this is clearly obvious by selecting the Global option. Once this is done, you can check one of checkbox in the top and enter the right id. [3].

- "Extract Track ID ... in raw format" allows you to extract an Audio or a Video stream in a raw format. In other words, if my input file is a mp4 and the video stream is composed of AVC type, I'll have an h264 stream in output. Another example, if you have an ASP video stream, then the raw output will be for mp4box a m4v file. For audio, if your stream corresponds to the aac then your output file will be an AAC for sure.

- "Extract Track ID ... in new mp4" can also extract an Audio or a Video stream selected previously but the output file will be a new mp4.

- "Extract Visual Track ID ...to an AVI file" can extract a Video stream and only a Video stream to an AVI file.

- "Extract Text Track ID..." if this is enabled, you have the possibility to extract subtitles whether SubRip format (srt) or to GPAC format (ttxt).

- If your input file is an AVI file then only "Extract Video|Audio from AVI files" option is enabled. This allows you to extract either a video stream or an Audio stream from AVI file. Here is an example : a video encoding with the x264 vfw compressor. To put it correctly in a new container (mp4 or mkv), you must extract this stream from your AVI. The extracted streams will be still in a raw format.

If your input file includes chapters, then you have the possibility to extract them with "Chapters" button [4]. If you don't see this button, don't panic. This means that your input file doesn't have chapters...;-)

To run the extract process, push "Extract" button [5]. The extracted stream will be in the same input file folder. At last, if you would like to save informations from your input file, you can do that by clicking on "Informations" button [6].

After your files are extracted you should see the extracted mp4 video file. The mp4 video file can now be directly burned as is to DVD using The Film Machine.

Alternatives

Allok Video to MP4 Converter

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Last update: 10:45 PM Friday, April 13, 2007