Movie speed/playback - 5500 vs 5600 vs ???

[ksignorini]

I am wondering (before I buy either a 5500 or a 5600) whether the 5500 plays movies well?  Does it skip?

How about MP3 decode/playback?  Does it skip there?

Of course, I'm also wondering about general speed, but if it can play a movie without skipping it should do well for everything else I want to do.

Thanks,
Kent!

p.s.  This was precipitated by my interest in a 5600 but I've since been considering a 5500 for support/software reasons.

[lardman]

Me again ;-)

It won't skip playing MP3s, but I imagine that even an overclocked 400MHz PXA chip machine will drop frames depending on the encoding (and w x h size) of the movie.

This is more the question which you need answering - what are the best encodings for the two machines, is there much image/sound quality difference, etc.

There was a thread on the forum pointing to someone's website, where they had listed, quite extensively, how to properly encode videos for the Z. It might be worth tracking this down (it may also be in the HowTos section actually).


Si

[Omicron]

I am wondering (before I buy either a 5500 or a 5600) whether the 5500 plays movies well?  Does it skip?

How about MP3 decode/playback?  Does it skip there?

Of course, I'm also wondering about general speed, but if it can play a movie without skipping it should do well for everything else I want to do.

Thanks,
Kent!

p.s.  This was precipitated by my interest in a 5600 but I've since been considering a 5500 for support/software reasons.

The 5500 plays properly encoded (AVI) movies well, however the audio and video can slowly go out of sync.....this may very well depend on the player...some say MPlayer can fix this to some extent, but I've never tried.


Basically (If I recall correctly) the 5500 plays movies well at 200-300Kbs and decimated frames by 2 (ie: every other frame...believe me you don't miss them on such a small screen).

I found movie watching on the 5500 quite enjoyable for all but the most out of sync movies....

BTW, the average size of a 5500 2 hour movie at my settings was about 300MB (but ranged wildy from 150MB to 380MB)...so plan on using at least a 512MB card to store at least one whole movie.  (A 4GB microdrive is also a great choice to carry a library of approx 12 movies around with you....but that is more $$)

[LavaDevil]

I just got MPlayer working on my SL-5500, it works quite well. I encoded my AVIs at 200Kbps and 15 FPS (<-- essential for audio sync). I ran MPlayer with these options:
-quiet
-cache 512
-framedrop (Drops frames to sync with the audio, MPlayer only does it when nessesary)