I'm rather busy at the moment, having spent the whole morning ignoring work and getting down to this movie playing problem that has been the bane of my existence for the last 3 days but I've finally solved it.

First you need to convert your DVD to an avi, then encode it through MS Media Encoder as ISO MPEG4 v1 codec (video) and Mpeg Layer 3 codec (sound) as described in this indispensible link by Chris Double http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/

Any problems, email me at namealreadygone@yahoo.co.uk

I'm no expert, but I've spent so long messing around that I'll probably be able to answer most of your basic problems with regards to getting it working (and it'll save you the trouble).

R

thanks for the information. i tried it out and it works great....wish i was able to get more storage space so I could add move movies. 2.9gigs? what's the deal

8

Enough room for a couple of episodes of Futurama to see me through the morning's journey

There are some whopping 2gig SD cards out soon so that will free up a bit more HD space for movies.

Meant to add - anyone who finds that the iso MPEG v1 codec is not available in Windows Media Encoder just needs to install WME v7.1 and it will magiclly appear.

I'm still playing with the settings in AVI rips and subsequent WME transfers so I'll keep this thread posted if I find any improvements in settings (or software).

So how big of a file does this produce?

Anybody using this? Or is there an alternative movie player that can play AVI's yet?

I've got some videos I'm trying to convert but I just can't get the Z to play them back, I have both a 5500 and 700. Unfortunately, I must use the Sharp Media Player app.

My original video is off a DV camcorder so it's 720x576. When I run Windows Media Encoder I follow the instructions from Chris Double's web page. When I transfer it to the Z I can't get the media player to load it. I get a simple dialogue saying can't load the file (it appears in the list so it can definitely see it).

Did you do any other processing to change image resolution ? When I set the bitrate, WME automatically set the converted size to 320x240.

Also, the output is set to WMV. Do you convert from WMV to ASF or do you just rename the file ?

thanks

koan

try mines at the bottom..
zaurus video
if you dont use windows, try a link to linux conversion site.

this is the linux one


http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hensley/zaurus/encode.html

I read here a lot on wmv or avi. Just wondering.... what about divx? I've seen movies in 800-900 MB, and they do play acceptably in TkCVIdeo (I have an 5500 and waiting for my 3100). Do TkCVideo works on the new ROMS, Can the applications that come with the new roms play divx?

Just wondering? What's your experience meddling with this?

Regards from the Tropics,
Otto Acuña
San Jose, Costa Rica

themovies i make are 320x240 or widerbfor widescreen at audio 160kbps. 29 fps and small 230mb. it is dicx and i run it in kino.

As far as I can tell, you'll get best performance on the Z for movies if you make sure the audio is encoded at 48000 Khz. I suspect that is the sampling rate that the Z hardware works at, and anything else requires extra cycles to translate. The version of Kino included in Cacko 1.23 has an option to transcode the audio for you.

In the experiments I did a while back it didn't matter what bitrate the audio was, as long as it was at 48000Khz. A 160kb/s Stereo movie had much better performance than a 32000kb/s mono one, with no change in the video data

The encodings I've done so far are 640x480, rotated 90 degrees, 24fps, 750 kb/s DivX 5.2.1, with a 128 kb/sec stereo audio track.