Video Playback
From OESF
Video Playback on the Zaurus, a guide to available playback software and what it runs on.
Apologies for the extremely incomplete nature of this information. I (eekee) have attempted to go through the forums and collate information relevant to video playback on the Zs but this is as far as I've got in several hours because the threads on the forum contain many trial attempts without any single summary of what actually worked at the end of the day.
If one out of every 5 people who are active in the forums and have got video playback to work on their Z posts a single paragraph on this page, I reckon we will have a very comprehensive guide to video playback on the Zaurus.
Contents |
Overview
Video playback is certainly possible on the Zaurus, even the 5000 & 5500 models have enough power for more than just MPEG-1 playback. There seem to be more problems reported with the 6000 series as software scaling a movie from 320x240 up to 640x480 is far too slow, see Hardware Notes for details.
Sharp video player
Needs ASF format. This is a Microsoft cut down version of MPEG-4. A while ago I did a very long hunt to find non-commercial software that would create a compatible ASF file but failed. Maybe the situation has changed ? - Koan
Kino2/MPlayer
Kino2 [1] is a Qtopia front-end to the widely-used MPlayer [2]. On the SL-C1000, the corresponding command line is basically "mplayer -vo bvdd filename".
Kino2 is included with the Cacko ROM.
Kino2 works well on the SL-CXX00. For example, it's able to play 640x480 videos encoded with XviD at 300 kb per second, 15 frames per second, although there's some choppiness. All the Xvid video podcasts from revision3.com and cnet.net play just fine in Kino2/mplayer, just chose the "small" Xvid format for download.
Users are reporting very mixed results getting Kino2 to work on the C6000.It seems it may require some configuration which may not be obvious even for the technically-minded, but this may pertain to MPlayer itself or be obsolete information. This post and subsequent ones dating from November '04 have information on getting it to work with the SL-6000L. There's a lot there and it really needs to be collated and verified as some of the steps appear unnecessary.
Kino2 is reported to crash on the 5500, but given that it is just a front end it is always worth checking the latest version if you can get mplayer working first.
No problems running Kino2 on the 750.
MPlayer may not be available for pre-PXE processors.
BVDD refers to the special Bulverde drivers. See Bvdd Video Driver.
TKC Video
A commercial app.
SafeDee
A commercial player reported to work on the 6000 series.
Dr. Z
This is a commercial player that is reported to work on the C6000, although video is said to be choppy with some (common?) encodings. It works best with DivX 5 videos and may not support some open encoding standards.
OPIE player
-rumored to crash on 5500/OPIE-
VLC Media Player
(needs info)
FFMPEG
(needs info)
Hardware Notes
Avoiding software scaling on the 6000 series seems to require editing (or creating) /etc/fb.modes to include a 320x240 size specification:
mode "qvga" geometry 240 320 240 320 16 timings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 endmode
(What does this refer to ? - seems to be a specific app - ~)
