Playing Movies on SL-C860

[roguetrooper]

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.

[omega]

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.

[omega]

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.

[ScottYelich]

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

[TonyOlsen]

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...

[roguetrooper]

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

[omega]

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.

[mr596]

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.

[Omicron]

You should follow directions here as a starting point:
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.

[roguetrooper]

You should follow directions here as a starting point:
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...)

[TonyOlsen]

...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...\".  

[ccrandal]

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

[TonyOlsen]

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.

-------

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.  

[SmackMyBishop]

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.

[TonyOlsen]

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...