Problems with Kino2 under Cacko Qtopia 1.20

[ccrandal]

I just installed the latest Cacko Qtopia ROM.  While playing around, I downloaded a couple of MPEG videos.  When I went to play them, Kino2 would only show a few frames and then freeze.  The video was very grainy as well.  The audio did continue to play, though.

Can anyone recommend a better MPEG player (esp one that\'ll play AVI too)?  Should I be using mplayer?  I also heard the player from TheKompany was supposed to be good too.

Thanks
Curt

[maslovsky]

No video player for Zaurus will be perfect, because of the hardware limitations. Even when overclocked to 471, then best you can get from the PXA255 processor is playing 320x240 MPEG1 video full screen. The 640x480, even with the lowest bitrate canot be handled...

[ccrandal]

Even playing with the smallest screen size doesn\'t help.  Like I said, you get a frame or two displayed and then the video locks.  That\'s more of an issue than the video player not being perfect... if this is all it does, it\'s unusable.  The two files I played are definitely not 640x480 in resolution and they play perfectly with Sony\'s Movie Player.

I\'ll give another player a try.

[jerrybme]

Even playing with the smallest screen size doesn\'t help.  Like I said, you get a frame or two displayed and then the video locks.  That\'s more of an issue than the video player not being perfect... if this is all it does, it\'s unusable.  The two files I played are definitely not 640x480 in resolution and they play perfectly with Sony\'s Movie Player.

I\'ll give another player a try.

I\'m guessing your problem is encoding, it\'s at too high of a bit rate for the Z to handle. I\'ve encoded lots of different movies with no problemand they all played well on Kino2.  Both mpeg & avi. For resources try the following-]

For encoding in linux http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hensley/zaurus/encode.html or  http://www.zeb.uklinux.net/encoding.html
For windows: http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/

[ccrandal]

Thanks for the links and info!  I hopefully I can adapter one of the Linux tools to OS X.

Curt

[jerrybme]

I hopefully I can adapter one of the Linux tools to OS X.

Curt

I imagine Mac already has good encoding apps, key is just get the bitrate and frame rate to the right spot. Good luck!

[stupkid]

Video in Kino2 plays best when in full screen mode in my experience on my c860 YMMV...

[Anonymous]

Kino\'s version of mplayer is not good.  Someone on this forum posted an awesome site about setting up a C760/860 for best performance.  One of the things they did was install Kino2, delete mplayer, and install the 1.0 version of mplayer.  That one works muuuuch better.  I don\'t know why cacko continues to include the old crummy version.  I convert my DVDs with VirtualDub to DIVX and I get full movies with 160bitrate audio that run pretty darn nice on my Z in 200MB.  They are a little pixelated, but this is to be expected.  If I convert them using MS Encoding to WMV, they are around 500MB, and the video is nearly crystal clear.  The secret seems to be mplayer 1.0.

[ccrandal]

Sweet!  I\'ve really been after a way to cut DVDs onto SD/CF and play on my handheld.  I\'ll have to check out some of these encoders and play around with my setup.

Thanks all for the help.

[jerrybme]

Someone on this forum posted an awesome site about setting up a C760/860 for best performance.  

Found the site http://viz.aset.psu.edu/ga5in/SharpZaurus.html
Confirmed with sashz that  0.91 is in Kino2. Maybe they\'ll update with next release of Kino2

[maslovsky]

Kino\'s version of mplayer is not good.  Someone on this forum posted an awesome site about setting up a C760/860 for best performance.  One of the things they did was install Kino2, delete mplayer, and install the 1.0 version of mplayer.  That one works muuuuch better.  I don\'t know why cacko continues to include the old crummy version.  I convert my DVDs with VirtualDub to DIVX and I get full movies with 160bitrate audio that run pretty darn nice on my Z in 200MB.  They are a little pixelated, but this is to be expected.  If I convert them using MS Encoding to WMV, they are around 500MB, and the video is nearly crystal clear.  The secret seems to be mplayer 1.0.

The mplayer 1.0 is more than 3 Mbytes. It won\'t fit into any ROM... If you guys need an updated version of mplayer, go ahead and install it separately...

[jerrybme]

The mplayer 1.0 is more than 3 Mbytes. It won\'t fit into any ROM... If you guys need an updated version of mplayer, go ahead and install it separately...

There is an ipk of mplayer available that is compiled to take advantage of the ATI graphics chip in the CXXX series http://www.self-core.org/~kaoru-k/pub/mpla...rc2.1-1_arm.ipk

Problem with current Cacko Qtopia rom is mplayer is in read only memory and even if you install the above ipk, seems the 0.91 version runs.

Is there a way to force kino2 to use version at /home/usr/local/bin instead of /usr/local.rom/lib? (or is there a way to modify local.rom?)
*** edit***  ignore above questions. The ipk works if you know how to type (see post below :oops: )

Thanks,
Jerry

[zbones]

from the link above.

# rm -rf /usr/local/bin/mplayer /usr/local/lib/mplayer /usr/local/etc/mplayer
# ipkg install mplayer-w100_1.0rc2.1-1_arm.ipk
# ln -s /opt/QtPalmtop/bin/mplayer /usr/local/bin/
# ln -s /opt/QtPalmtop/etc/mplayer/ /usr/local/etc/
# ln -s /opt/QtPalmtop/lib/mplayer/ /usr/local/lib/
# ipkg install libvorbisdec_1.2.0-1_arm.ipk

on my c760 I do get more screen corruption than before, on a divx that does not fill the screen, it does work very nicely if you encode black bars into the divx however.

Peter.

*** edit **** I just noticed that it was you who posted the link :oops:   did that not work for you?  Works for me.

[jerrybme]

*** edit **** I just noticed that it was you who posted the link :oops:   did that not work for you?  Works for me.

 :oops:  Doh! My newbie skills come through again. Must have miss-typed when I followed directions in above link. Originally, got read-only error. Then found mplayer binary in  /usr/local.rom/bin. and jumped to conclusions :oops:

Retried directions again and indeed they work. The pixel garbage at the bottom of the screen is indeed gone. Difficult to judge speed increase if any with the avi & mpeg files I have at present. One is an avi at 352X240 @ 29 fps, it is watchable with old mplayer and no noticable difference with new mplayer, still dropping occasional frames.

But nice to have the garbage gone at the bottom of the screen.

Jerry

[stupkid]

This link might be better for those wanting the newer mplayer:

http://wiki.self-core.org/atty/?MPlayer