OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Software => Topic started by: roguetrooper on June 03, 2004, 07:43:19 am
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I transfer music videos (usually around 30MB each, such as ace of base - All that she wants.mpg 29MB) onto the internal flash, and then try and use KINO2 to play them, KINO2 just seems to reset with no movie playback.
Video Player Ver. 1.00 does play them, but with a lot of distortion (in need of the correct technical term).
Am I missing something fundamental here? I\'m fairly UNIX (BSD mostly) experienced if it helps.
I\'d love to be able to play my music videos whilst on the move.
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Hey. If that\'s just mpeg 1, which is very likely then all you need to make sure is that the resolution is 320*240. Also you make need to change to audio decoder option in the preferences menu (i can\'t remember, but i sometimes need to alternate between the two options). There is a optimised mplayer (kino2 is the front end), but i have no installed it yet. I did however update the kino2, as i was having problems with this. BTW, i now compress my music videos to divx 5 in about 10megs, 112 48 mp3.
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I was having the exact same problems when i started, now that i think about it. just checked, i installed Kino2 0.3 beta, and now i can watch most things without any hassle.
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What is a good source of videos? I\'m thinking about getting a tv capture card for my pc... is that the best or most preferred method?
Scott
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Don\'t forget that often times the video\'s actual compression will not match with the file extension. There are hundreds of different video codecs commonly in use out there right now and your Zaurus only supports maybe 6 or so...
If you see a lot of distortion, what it usually means is that your player only supports an older codec of the codec used by the video. During video playback the player will come across video codec commands in the video file which is doesn\'t understand and it will either ignore them or will do it incorrectly. The result: distortion in the video.
If you\'re seeing distortion then I doubt your using MPEG1 video here...
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Thanks Guys
Well, has anyone a great demo Video(s) I could show off my SL-C860 with? (Maybe supply a link)
Nothing I have seems to work that well
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There is a finding Nemo video sample. There is a thread around here about some guy testing loads of different codecs, and he gives the results for each.
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I have noticed that Kino2 seems to not play videos with long (ish) filenames (e.g BlackAdder_2_1_Ink_And_Incapability.avi will not play but ba21.avi will). Don\'t know if that\'ll help.
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You should follow directions here as a starting point:
http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/ (http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/)
Then mess with KBS and FPS as well as size
Also Virtual Dub is great for taking AVI and enhancing them (making brighter, cropping, etc etc).
I ussual make AVI\'s to my liking (long process) and then use virt dub to brighten, crop, resize, (and use other tools to boost sound) and then take the AVI and proceed with Windows Media Encoder.
when you find the perfect balance for maximum usage of wide screen, please post so we can compare notes.
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You should follow directions here as a starting point:
http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/ (http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/)
Then mess with KBS and FPS as well as size
Also Virtual Dub is great for taking AVI and enhancing them (making brighter, cropping, etc etc).
I ussual make AVI\'s to my liking (long process) and then use virt dub to brighten, crop, resize, (and use other tools to boost sound) and then take the AVI and proceed with Windows Media Encoder.
when you find the perfect balance for maximum usage of wide screen, please post so we can compare notes.
great, thats a real useful link, I\'ll start investigating immediately.
PS. You know your a geek when you are single, solvent and it\'s a warm summer saturday night in a big city and you spend it alone playing with your Zaurus at home:) (whilst your friends party...)
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...and you think your \"Party-ing friends\" are crazy for missing out on all of this Zaurus fun!
Someone should start a \"You know you\'re a Zaurus geek when...\" thread... similar to \"You know you\'re a Redneck when...\".
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I have a lot of problems playing video on the Z. For a while I was having better luck with Media Player, but now Kino2 seems to be working out better. For instance, I have a movie that\'s about 914KB, 320x240 resolution, 30fps, rate is 44100, bitrate is 224000, and using ffmp2 for audio codec. Works perfectly in Kino2 and in Media Player the audio zips by in a second and the video is garbled.
Not sure what MPEG version it is, though.
One thing I noticed with the Clie and with PPC is that they usually had a video encoder that would take your movie on the desktop and convert it over to something viewable on the PDA. I know there are tons of OSS apps that do this, but I haven\'t had much luck. On my Mac, I\'ve used a combination of DiVA, VLC, and 3vix to convert DVD content to MPEG1 videos. It never works... I can only get it to Quicktime format and the finished product is FAR from perfect.
Can anyone recommend decent OSS software that converts, compresses, etc. videos from one format to another... ripping from DVD is a big plus. Hell, I wouldn\'t even mind spending $25-$50 or so for commercial software. I really want to take my \"Curb Your Enthusiasm\" and \"South Park\" DVDs and rip individual episodes to MPEG1 for viewing on my Zaurus. I have some in Quicktime, but converting to MPEG1 just hasn\'t been working too well.
Thanks
Curt
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Windows Media Encoder has been working fine for me. I do 30 fps, 250 kbps, 320xNNN. Windows Media recognizes all of the codecs which are viewable on Windows Media Player and DivX players. The trick here is that you have to configure Windows Media correctly. You have to alter the Windows Registry (1 simple entry to add) so that Media Encoder support MP3. Then you have to set up the encoder to encode to MP3 Audio (I do 40 kbps stereo) and \"ISO MPEG4 Video\". (Note, that \"ISO MPEG-4 Video\" is different than \"Windows Media 9 Video\"). Also, anything larger than 320x240 will not display on the default SL-C860 QTopia \"Movie Player\", even though the SL-C860 is VGA (640x480).
ISO MPEG4 is worse than Divx, QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Player, or any or recent codec I\'ve seen. It\'s single pass only and mostly CBR (some variation).
...but ISO MPEG4 is many times better than the primitive MPEG1 or MPEG2.
That is what has worked for me. I\'ve been told many times that \"MPlayer\" supports full DivX 5, which is much better quality than MPEG-4, but I haven\'t tried it yet and don\'t know if it works or not.
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So from DVD to Zaurus video you would:
* Decrypt the DVD using any of a number of DVD Decrypters out there. I\'ve heard that \"DVD Decrypter\" (Free) is very good and easy to use.
* I then encode it into HIGH QUALITY DivX 5 using \"Dr. Divx\". (I checked... now on sale for $40 at DivX.Com)
* I then re-encode the DivX into MPEG-4 using \"Windows Media Encoder\" (Free, Requires WinXP or Win2000). (I\'m told there are Linux encoders that can do this too)
This may not be the best solution (the video file gets encoded twice, but since the resulting Zaurus video is less than half the size of the original I usually regain any video quality I\'ve lost by first converting it to DivX)... but it works fine for me.
Windows Media Encoder \"may\" be able to work with the resulting \"DVD Decrypter\" VOB video files directly. I haven\'t tried that yet.
I hope that helps.
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You really shouldn\'t be adding yet another lossy encode/decode cycle to the process... You\'re already transcoding from lossy MPEG2 to lossy MPEG4, the DivX encode doesn\'t get you anything but a longer encode time and another quality hit.
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Yes.. but I think I recover some of the \"quality hit\" when the video is resized to half the size. Also, the DIVX files I create are the highest quality setting (about 1.5 GB per movie), so I\'m likely not losing much quality at all in this move. I don\'t know if Windows Media Encoder recognizes VOB files...
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You\'re also going AC3-]MP3-]MP3 for the audio with that process, right?
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Yes... But I\'m going from AC3 to 128 kbps MP3 to 40 kbps MP3... so the quality loss at the 128 kbps MP3 shouldn\'t be big enough that you would notice it at the resulting 40 kbps MP3 quality.
Yes, going strait across without an inbetween compression is better, but I doubt anyone will notice the quality difference doing it this way. This way will work until a better solution is posted (for Windows machines)
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What is a good source of videos? I\'m thinking about getting a tv capture card for my pc... is that the best or most preferred method?
Scott
Hi Scott
It depends on what you mean, my Debian desktop is now a \"media centre\" used for TV, music etc. I can record TV shows and convert them for the Z. You need a fast PC to capture TV, it\'s also best not to use the PC (or burden the CPU further) during ripping or you can loose frames. But I tend to rip, I mean, make backups of my DVDs and VCDs for use on my Z, they both work equally well. But I\'d say source your Z vids from DVD or VCD, unless you have digital satellite or digital TV like we have in the UK, I don\'t know if you have that in the US though. I have the original Star Wars trilogy sourced from VCD which looks and plays great on the Z. Whichever you use, remember to convert it to 320x240.
-Francis
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You guys getting either Kino2 or Video Player to run mpeg4 clips ok? I can\'t seem to get them to work at all in either app.
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I\'ve only gotten Movie Player (default with QTopia) to work. I only played around with the others a little.
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Has anyone made wmv or asf\'s using mencoder on Linux that work on the C Series video player?
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I have been following this thread. In the last 6 months, I have started backing up my DVDs. I used DVX which a super collection of tools. Gordian Knot is supposed to be great, but it wasn\'t for me. There is something heretical about having to use M$ to be able to play videos on my Linux handheld. I was hoping that I could take my xvid/ogg/ogm movies and play them on my 860 using mplayer (or similar) with minimum hassle. Sounds like I will end up encoding everything twice (or three times if I buy my daughter that nifty GBA movie player). When will this madness end? This is a good thread. Thanks.
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If you can get it to work, I very much so recommend MEncoder, part of MPlayer ( http://mplayerhq.hu (http://mplayerhq.hu) ) (The movie player for linux) (MPlayer is also ported to the Zaurus)
There\'s a windows version on mplayer, but I\'m not sure it has the encoder. It recognizes dvds.
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MEncoder sounds like a great tool, but I don\'t have Linux on my desktop (yet), so I\'m forced to stick with Windows Media Encoder for the time being. So far I haven\'t heard of another Windows solution for encoding...
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How about for the Mac? I do have MPlayer OS X 2 on my Macs and it works pretty good (by far the best codec support, but not the greatest interface). I never really checked to see if MEencode was ported along with MPlayer.
I wish I could get VLC running on the Z. I see there\'s some info on a port for the Z on their website, but I haven\'t been able to get it to work yet. I have been able to use VLC on a Mac to extract my VOBs and then compress those down to something smaller that VLC can play.
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If you can get it to work, I very much so recommend MEncoder, part of MPlayer ( http://mplayerhq.hu (http://mplayerhq.hu) ) (The movie player for linux) (MPlayer is also ported to the Zaurus)
There\'s a windows version on mplayer, but I\'m not sure it has the encoder. It recognizes dvds.
BTW, the other poster was asking about Windows applications. DVX that I mentioned (and Gordian Knot) is for windows. As to whether they do ISO MPEG4, etc. I don\'t know. I know nothing about Gordian because I was too stupid to use it. To check out DVX, go to http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx/ (http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx/). Good luck.
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DVX that I mentioned (and Gordian Knot) is for windows.
And these encode into MPEG4 Video with MP3?
I\'m told that MPlayer for Zaurus plays full DivX (all DivX), so any DivX encoder would work for this, but I don\'t know of anything else that encodes to ISO MPEG4 with MP3. Do DVX and Gordian Knot encode to ISO MPEG4 with MP3?
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I\'m encoding with virtualdub in divx ... still haven\'t found any suitable format for movies but 320x240, 250~350Kbps for video compression and 22Khz mono@4Kbps mp3 works fine for anime/simpson/futurama episodes ... still searching for best settings for movies
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22Khz mono@4Kbps mp3
Sweet! Which encoder do you use for the 4 kbps MP3?
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not sure about which codecs I have installed ... I must have a million codecs on my windows box ... these are just one of the settings gave to me by virtualdub for the audio stream in mp3 format. I must have the name of the correct codec on my other computer @work so I\'ll tell you 2morrow exactly which codec I used
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I transfer music videos (usually around 30MB each, such as ace of base - All that she wants.mpg 29MB) onto the internal flash, and then try and use KINO2 to play them, KINO2 just seems to reset with no movie playback.
Video Player Ver. 1.00 does play them, but with a lot of distortion (in need of the correct technical term).
Am I missing something fundamental here? I\'m fairly UNIX (BSD mostly) experienced if it helps.
I\'d love to be able to play my music videos whilst on the move.
Checkout my post here:
http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php?n...iewtopic&t=5071 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5071)
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I might have missed if anyone already stated this, but for me Kino2 never works with files that have spaces in their filenames.