Related
I want to convert some short and long video files to my PPC but I'm unsure about what format and bit rate.
I use WMP for my music and TCPMP for video. I notice that MPG usually gives better picture but I'm still trying to find a good bit rate and other settings.
Any recommendations? Size is not too much of an issue (4GB card), I prefer quality and lack of freeze and skipping.
My PPC is SX66.
How will you get a full movie (Wall-E) to work on the AT&T Fuze? Do you have to convert to a different format or size? Please help.
For best performance, it's best that you convert it. The more you start doing it and mess with the settings, the better you'll become and find which settings yield the best results.
I originally tried Quicktime Pro for this, but the people at Apple have decided that the iPhone screen is the biggest resolution they want to support on export, and I don't want the player scaling up, so I had to look elsewhere.
I'm playing with a program called Allok MPEG4 converter (http://www.alloksoft.com/mp4_converter.htm), which seems to do a nice job if a bit slowly. Of course, to do a nice job requires LOTS of processing power. I have been using the defaults except for making the output H264 and 640x480. Once the files are converted, I just copy them to the Fuze's SD card and play them from there.
I use a program called VideoReDo (www.videoredo.com) to suck in the DVD files and make a single large MPG file from them (the free DVDShrink will also work for this, if you can still find it somewhere), then load that single file into Allok and let it run. A decent DVD will take pretty much overnight to process. The results have been very good so far.
Start with a small (5 minutes or so) piece to practice with and try various settings, then when you're happy, let the full movie conversion run overnight.
Also, be aware that most commercial DVD's will have DRM and you will have to deal with that before you can do anything with the files.
xhypnotik said:
How will you get a full movie (Wall-E) to work on the AT&T Fuze? Do you have to convert to a different format or size? Please help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you are converting from an .avi file then you can try PocketDivXEncoder (freeware). It has presets for Diamond which you should start with. You should decide whether you want VGA or QVGA. VGA should look a little sharper but will be ~30% increase in file size and on a 2.8" screen the difference may not be much. Test for your self
I would modify some of the settings though. Leave video as is. Change the audio (small arrow on the left) to 32Khz 80 kbps stereo. Go to advanced and tick 2-Pass and Xvid.
What is your source file for the movie? If its on DVD then you definately want to convert it. Once all of my media is ripped or converted to the container / format I want I leave it at computer base resolution and just play it on the phone. Core player has done pretty well at handleing what I put at it so far.
Now that PocketDivx Encoder is a good program and does a pretty good job and shrinking files down.
Any recommendations on codecs, resolution and bitrate? I would especially be interested if anyone knew which settings preserved battery life the best while watching video.
Menneisyys has a good thread on video playback.
I use Core Player and I really don't covert any of the TV shows that I watch.
Windows Movie Maker is a great tool too. Its free (if you have XP SP2 installed) and it uses WMV format that Windows Media Player Mobile will play without any addons.
If you watch alot of movies on your Touch Pro I would suggest investing in Core Player, it plays most of the commonly used codex and its pretty quick too.
Bit rates and resolutions: I have found that if its a TV show that is about 40 to an hour, I dont have to do anything with it. For example an episode of House is about 42 minutes long, its 624x352 and running at 23.97 frames. With Core Player the episode looks flawless, eventhough the statistics on Core Player say its dropping frames, I can't tell.
I would think that a full length movie would perform a little worse, or a TV show with alot of action.
Also fatheadpi has this thread posted about encoding video for the Raphael phones.
Thanks for all the reply's. I'll try them out.
Watch Movies on Fuze Problems
So I got an HTC FUZE not too long ago and have been trying desperately to get it to play movies.
Windows Mobile Player does not want to play the wmv files I give it...
and no matter what file I use with CorePlayer the audio is terrible
mpegs, mp4, avi, h.264...
All of these videos will play fine on my computer but as soon as I get it to my phone, the audio goes to crap.
To make it all more difficult, I only have a Mac to sync this device with, so Windows based programs are useless to me...
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks all,
'Jammin
I too have been trying and so far no Success
Operating my Fuze in cooperation with a Mac Laptop is difficult enough. The programs most suggest to convert videos exist mainly for PC.
I have used many methods of conversion and found no luck with producing watchable quality on my FUZE
CorePlayer gives me bad audio playback when the video played perfectly on my computer
and Windows Media Player will not play my bigger wmv files for some reason.
Let me know if you found a combo of programs and settings that really works
'Jammin
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=467112
I use this and it works great. Converting the video is a pain in the butt.
+1 Take time to convert but yield a much better result in viewing your video in either Album or WMP
Thanks for the info, but isn't that program for PC's?
I have many different methods of converting videos
from freeware that helps me with wmv's (as I am on a Mac and that is somewhat hard to do)
To Final Cut Pro's Compressor and even Adobe's version
Windows Media Player on my Fuze seems not to like any files over 100mb
and even though the video will look awesome on my computer after conversion, the players I use on my phone completely destroy the audio...
I've searched up and down threads like these and am at a complete loss...
qwik question
which is better to convert movies to my fuze spb video or avs video?
sorry people
um what size micro sd card on average would I need to store the videos?
get at minimum a 4GB microSDHC... under $8 if you're lucky
or a 8GB for $16... no reason to jump for that now that memory isn't that expensive
Use coreplayer bro
I bought it, and its amazing $29.95... Don't convert anything that I get. It only has trouble with on6 flv files, and devs say it'll never support codec. Shame, because flash 9 and 10 protected movies are almost all encoded with this...
A small ffmpeg utility can run one through flv to avi, keeping aspect and original source resoultion, and process a 1.5 hour flv file in about 3 minutes and give you a great quality avi output for your phone
With TCPMP I get lag when watching full movies, but Coreplayer is fine
Set video to the qtv display, high quality.
If you've got bad audio, perhaps you need to lower the pre-am if muffled, or increase if quiet
Also, you may have equaliser enabled, and not know it.
Check the options section go through pages
There definatley should not be a problem playing media with this program
Only problem now is.... I bought this... ya sweet - but now can't afford to get my raph unlocked until next month
So still without a mobile
xhypnotik said:
How will you get a full movie (Wall-E) to work on the AT&T Fuze? Do you have to convert to a different format or size? Please help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
News Flash
Disney released Wall-E on DVD and Blue Ray discs. I have yet to see a cell phone with a built in DVD or Blue Ray player.
The motion picture experts group (standards body)...MPEG for short, many years ago, decided to evolve the distribution techology (for consumers), from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is a broad spec and covers everything from small hand held devices to HD quality video (H.264, VC-1 etc).
Your Touch Pro has built in hardware acceleration to handle MP4 up to a reasonable limit. Your best built in video players, as delivered by the OEM, are HTC Album and Windows Media Player. Both apps support hardware accleration for MP4 video.
I continue to read about (and have purchased) Coreplayer. In the mobile space, Coreplayer is a modest improvement over the free open source TCPMP player. CorePlayer, caused a brief stir when they half-hacked into the (modest) built in hardware acceleration on the HTC Kaiser.
On a Touch Pro, Coreplayer does support non industry standard video formats, but only in software mode (slowly rendered down sized formats). Coreplayer fails dismally, when compared to Album or WMP for MP4 playback.
So...yes, convert your content to a fully supported format. Or...leech your content in supported formats. Search this forrum and you'll find guidance, and free conversion tools.
I own a TP2. There are four different ways (that I'm aware of) to get iPlayer material playing on this phone:
1) Change the User Agent string in Opera 9.5 to impersonate a Samsung Omnia. You can then visit the mobile version of the iPlayer website and stream material. It plays in the Streaming Media player. Resolution is roughly 320x176. Doesn't work over 3G unless you're with 3 or Vodafone.
2) For programmes that have a "download for mobile device" option on the main iPlayer site (browsed from a desktop PC) you can grab the resulting .wmv file, copy it across to the phone, and play it on the TP2's "Pocket" Media Player. Resolution is 320x176 (ish).
3) There is a stand-alone iPlayer app, which imitates an iPhone; however, it doesn't work on my TP2 (just crashes before you can access anything).
4) The "myplayer" app. This offers two options: stream at 320x176, or (sometimes) download in .mov format. The latter has a slightly higher resolution - something like 480x270. The .mov files can be played back fairly well using Coreplayer, I believe, but I'm too cheap to pay for Coreplayer. Using TCPMP it's a bit jerky, and playing full-screen even more so. Does work over 3G although your carrier will hate you if you try it.
Now, using HTCAlbum as a player, the TP2 can very comfortably handle an .mp4 file with a res of 800x480, and a bit-rate of 750kb/s. So what I'm wondering is if there's any other way of getting iPlayer material to play which offers a higher resolution and better video quality?
The "iPlayer Desktop" downloads appear to be in .mp4 format, but no player other than iPlayer Desktop seems to be able to make head or tail of them.
IPlayer does offer higher-res .wmv downloads of some programmes - these have a res of something like 720x540, but are recorded anamorphically (so they play back at 960x540 or so, with horizontal upscaling). Trying to play one of these on a TP2 (using Windows Media Player) is fairly painful - the bit-rate is too high for it handle, and it doesn't recognise that it's anamorphic, so the aspect ratio is wrong. Feeding one of these WMV's through the Encoder programme that I normally use for converting video to HTCAlbum-compliant .mp4 files produces sparkly gibberish - the WMV is obviously encrypted in a way the Encoder application can't detect or handle.
Are there any other options I'm missing?
Do people feel that Coreplayer on the HD2 is sufficiently much better than TCPMP that it justifies the price premium?
Shasarak said:
Do people feel that Coreplayer on the HD2 is sufficiently much better than TCPMP that it justifies the price premium?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In my opinion not really:
Does not read MKV files / H264 in spite of claim to do so (this is a huge let down)
streaming support is lacking (Windows Player can read streams that Coreplayer can't).
If you want to manage your music library there are other alternatives
No, useless in my opinion. WMP or HTC Album do a better job.
CorePlayer:
- is very old (the developer never seriously updated the current version and is also unable to deliver a v2).
- No hardware acceleration,
- cannot play AC3,
- cannot play MKV,
- cannot play real HD movies,
- has no recent codecs,
- has a very old interface.
It's a dying software.
Kinoma Play is much more promissing.
arturobandini said:
No, useless in my opinion. WMP or HTC Album do a better job.
CorePlayer:
- is very old (the developer never seriously updated the current version and is also unable to deliver a v2).
- No hardware acceleration,
- cannot play AC3,
- cannot play MKV,
- cannot play real HD movies,
- has no recent codecs,
- has a very old interface.
It's a dying software.
Kinoma Play is much more promissing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
QFE
Serriously htc album and wmp can play video better on the hd2 than coreplayer can, and version 2 is coming soon yup soooooooon (yawn)
There's no question that HTCAlbum and Media Player do a better job on video formats they actually support, but that's not many. I need something to play back downloaded xvids as well. TCPMP doesn't do too bad a job, but I'm wondering how much of an improvement I'd see with CorePlayer.
Actually there's one other possible issue when comparing with HTCAlbum and PMP besides format-compatibility and that's colour adjustment; TCPMP allows some tweaking of the video decoding - brightness, contrast, saturation, and white balance. The colour temperature on my HD2 is shifted quite badly to blue, so playback using TCPMP looks better if I can dial the blue down a bit. This option isn't available in HTCAlbum, and I haven't yet found it in Pocket Media Player (although I haven't looked very hard).
There's an additional problem in TCPMP, here, in that what appears to be the optimum combination of settings for maximum Benchmark framerate also happens to be one that disallows any video adjustments except brightness. (It disables dithering as well). The settings in question: use DirectDraw as renderer, then choose YUY2 as your overlay format, uncheck "use colorkey" and "use blitting" and check "use device stretching". If I switch to using RGB overlays instead of YUY2 then all the colour adjustment controls come back, but playback is much less smooth.
I assume Coreplayer has similar issues, but if it's sufficiently much faster in terms of basic performance then a colour-adjustable format may still play faster than an non-adjustable one in TCPMP.
So, what sort of performance difference is there? I'm guessing the difference is smaller than it would be on (say) a Touch HD because there's no HD2 equivalent to using QTV overlays...?
Hi
I use CorePlayer very often, and my opinion is: drag & drop Your (not compressed) *.avi file on memory card and enjoy fine quality on almost full screen resolution. About music: choose folder with Your music (mp3) , select all files and put headphones on.
CorePlayer is miles better than TCPMP, there is absolutely no doubt about it. Yet it has annoying limitations, so it's miles away from being perfect or even excellent. Such is the sad state of affairs with regard to video playback on mobile devices that CorePlayer is the best we have... At least we have it on WM, iPhone and Android don't even come close.
I used coreplayer for as long as I can remember. OK it's not PERFECT. but it does the job VERY nicely. No other program I tried, for the kick of it, made the job like coreplayer can.
Howdy folks, hope some of you might have a few suggestions for a new Android guy.
After much love and consideration for the Android platform, I decided to come over to the Android world. Sold my iPhone 4 and picked myself up a Thunderbolt at the neighborhood Verizon store. So far, I love it. Great device, screen, customization and service. A world of difference from AT&T. However there is one lingering issue.
On my iPhone, I could send 720p direct from iTunes to the phone. It played smooth as silk, nary an issue, perfect.
With the Tbolt's fantastic size of screen, I would think it would be the perfect place for mobile HD video. However, when I take an mp4 onto the Tbolt, it chokes. The playback is varying levels of choppy, and audio often loses sync.
Am I doing something wrong? Is the Tbolt not capable of playing this type of file? I see a lot of talk on the forums about Froyo messing with 720 playback. I'm not sure what to do because aside from that one issue, I love the phone.
Any feedback/advice/info is appreciated. I love Android and so far the community rocks.
Signed,
Former iPhone User
i had the same problem. installed "vplayer advanced" and it was much better - no skipping, no sync issues. i think you just need to find a different player. the hardware should play them fine, but i havent tried a 5 gig 720p HD movie yet. and the default player wont play mkv files, but vplayer did.
You guys do realize the thunderbolt's screen is 800x480, which is a lower resolution than 720 (which you normally think of in terms of 1280x720 resolution). The horizontal scan lines on the thunderbolt (480) is the same as a standard definition television (640x480), so all you're getting is a placebo effect and a huge drain on your phone battery/resources.
yareally said:
You guys do realize the thunderbolt's screen is 800x480, which is a lower resolution than 720 (which you normally think of in terms of 1280x720 resolution). The horizontal scan lines on the thunderbolt (480) is the same as a standard definition television (640x480), so all you're getting is a placebo effect and a huge drain on your phone battery/resources.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Totally understand this. However, for me its more an issue of ease of use. I don't want to convert videos 3 times because I have 3 devices, which was the nice thing about the iPhone/iTunes. One file, done.
Plus, I've downconverted the videos to test, sometimes they skip too, and they never look as good to me. Placebo effect maybe, but again the ease of use thing is the biggest importance to me. If the iPhone 4 can handle this kind of file, why shouldn't my Tbolt?
Problem is probably not the hardware (since the thunderbolt outdoes the iphone in this), it's probably the codecs on the phone not being adept enough to handle them or the developer of your media player not keeping up with certain advancements in android hardware.
Just for instance on a pc, coreAVC will work on really old computers for x264 hd movies (ive gotten it to run smooth on pentium centrinos), however, the built in codecs for something like VLC player (last I checked), couldnt handle a computer that old for rendering HD.
The other issue could be how well they (both the android os developers and the media player developers) take advantage of using the hardware to do all the heavy lifting in the decoding. If it's all being done with software (like VLC does by default on a pc), then that is going to kill the cpu. If it's leveraging the gpu in the phone to take some of the burden off the cpu (similar to what something like coreAVC does now on a pc with nvidia's cuda), then that would help immensely. If in fact android can leverage the gpu to handle things like video decoding, then the final issue is whether or not the developer of your chosen media player is taking advantage of that.
However, if it was some sort of hardware issue, it could be the read speed of the included sd cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Speeds. Try sticking a smaller video file directly in the internal storage of the phone and see if that makes a difference.
I haven't looked too far into the internals of the typical android phone and os yet, but coming from many years of linux and windows development for the web and desktop, those are just my thoughts on the issue.
Android OS 3.0 has an encoder built into it already for h264 avc, so that should take care of issues in the near future for converting your video. Whenever we get gingerbread finally (well 2.3.3 that is), we'll have vp8 decoder as well and that should run things much smoother as google built it themselves for html5 video streaming, so I'd hope it would run efficiently on android. I've read issues with people not being able to handle high res MP4 files on the inspire (the att's thunderbolt) so it doesnt overly surprise me you are as well. I assume they are h264/mp4 files, right? Perhaps try encoding to h263 if so or wmv
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html#core
Yeah your gonna have to Download a Video Player app that is Hardware accelerated and plays those kinds of Video Formats. Rockplayer should work too i think.
Been up all night loading my anime + tv shows on the bolt. I agree, i really don't want to be bothered with trans-coding everything i have, plus the bolt does has DLNA capabilities which is another plus if you have a server loaded with the proper media but chances are, those are 720p or better as well.
The best player i used so far is rock player, it beats out meridian, qq player, and vplayer advanced as is the only player that played back everything i threw at it. that said is not pefect, it drops frames when you try to playback 720p mp4 but still smooth for the most part. It lags a bit more with 720p mkv, and lags really bad with 720p avi files. Anything not using the native hardware decoder however, sucks a ton of battery life out the Bolt.
it will playback almost anything at 480p, which is about what the screen native resolution is at. The Bolt does come with a Adreno 205 gpu but i don't think that does anything for video acceleration, maybe is missing the proper hardware decoding chipset which is why is not armed with a HDMI port.
It should only get better with improvement in software/codec but for now, is a let down in terms of video playback.
Try Diceplayer 1.3.0
Thunderbolt's QSD8655 can play H.264 720p.
but HTC's stock media player can't handle MKV, DTS , Flac.
Diceplayer take advantage of hw decoder.
it can play MKV(+DTS+720p).
Don't worry about battery life. diceplayer use almost same power as stock player.
MoboPlayer with ARM V7_NEON coded plays everything fine.
http://www.moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html
For reasons stated earlier there does not seem to be any good solution that will handle all common formats used in a PC/Mac/Home theater system on a Tbolt without re-encoding. I posted a video player "shoot out" of sorts over on the "other" forum. In short I was completely let down by all the players I tested. There are a couple here I did not include at that time.
http://forum.androidcentral.com/ver...layers-review-test-comparison-included-3.html
The only one I left on my device was MoboPlayer.
Don't bother with files larger then 4GB either, our SD cards do not support them (or was it the OS...). That being said a good 720p rip with 5 or 6 channels of audio (yes I know there are not enough speakers to hear them all - just so no re-encode required) should generally be smaller than 4 GB.
I am quite keen to hear about any diceplayer vs. MoboPlayer as I did not test diceplayer.
yumms said:
MoboPlayer with ARM V7_NEON coded plays everything fine.
http://www.moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mobo or Rock or vital or QQPlayer can not play MKV(+DTS) HD.
dice is the best. dice use hw video decoder. no sw video decoding.
juami said:
Mobo or Rock or vital or QQPlayer can not play MKV(+DTS) HD.
dice is the best. dice use hw video decoder. no sw video decoding.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did some quick testing of diceplayer. It is no good. I used the same blend of file types, video formats, audio formats, files sizes and audio and video quality as my tests I posted about with the link to the other forum (prior post in this thread). Diceplayer was very bad. It played 1 out of 4 of the files I tested. Some played but had garbled audio or a very slow frame rate meaning effectively no successful play. I found Moboplayer to be slightly better than Diceplayer.
We really need an equivalent to VLC for Android. VLC as anyone can testify is the "swiss army knife" of players. Plex is the only app better than VLC in that it can output DTS and Dolby via optical (not concerns for a mobile device obviosuly). Who can or wants to re-encode a multi terabyte movie library?