That's it...I'm ready for movies!!

TMpgenc should handle all of what you said.
At least I think it should ;)

I just use MPEG video, since it's roughly the same size and quality is about the same on a small display anyway.
 


Scott, this is at least the second time in two days you've posted a useless "how do you know so much" post. Maybe it's because you are 13 and are easily amazed by adult conversation. Do you ask your teachers every five minutes how they know so much?! Well, stop asking here.

As for quality, it sounds like you are saying that spending time to create quality video is a waste of time. For many of us, quality is paramount. If we wanted half-assed video, there would be no reason to seek information from the forum.

Suggestion: why don't you limit your posts to one a day and spend most of the day working on a quality post. You know, one with a clear thought and expressed with proper grammar and spelling. You could approach it like a school assignment. In fact, if you choose to accept my challenge, we would be happy to grade you on it. In time, you may get an A.

ed-
 
hey iiicRules, I see you in the Ipaq parts now. If you still check this out id like to tell you that iTask is a one button task switcher. If you press and hold it will switch to another program. There are also freeware apps to close programs when you tap the red X. And if you are looking for freeware, check out my thread located in my sig named best freeware. Ya might also want to look at the begginers guide I wrote.

John
 
Well I installed the trial version which supports .mov(quicktime) files. I tried it using video clips from my Kodak camera and it said something about no longer supporting this version of .mov file. My Quicktime Player on my desktop plays it fine. So that defeats one purpose of buying that software. It really makes me suspicious that the software codec is tied to Kinoma Producer and I don't want to use Kinoma Producer just to be able to view a simple clip from my SD card recorded on my camera.
 
I sure I am going to do that. I got enough problems with doing assignments in school not only out of it. I'll think about it, about the 2 useless posts, I was bored this morning. Sorry about that I went back and delted it. I got no spell checker I am on a different computer out of my house and do not have a spell checker or grammar checker. Sorry ! Yes I like adult conversation but I am sorry if I wasted your time.
Thanx for being honest.



Deleted useless post
 
.mov is a container format and can thus contain a variety of different codecs, (quite often Soreson video). By .mov support they may .mov's made with soreson codec...
I would be shocked if Kinomas new player can play DivX's etc straight off without any conversion whatsoever. I think you are likely to be correct- that it's a proprietery mpeg4 codec that can only be made using producer....
I will check it out the free bit soon, but I'm not buying it!
 
My hard drive decided to go kaput last week and I just got it back and am close to re-configuring it to my personal tastes.

Having said all that, I hope I didn't miss much in the "PDA movies" themepark where you must be "This" mature to post.

iiicrules: I'll check on that storage limit and see what we can do about it.

The rest of you: As you were!
It feels good to be back.
POL9A
 
Hi POL.

I hope I won't be booed for asking you an off topic question:
What happened to your HD and how it got fixed?
After all no PDA can work properly without the support of a working PC...
 
This is probably a hardware issue and not software. I don't think the hardware in my garmin Ique 3600 can run high quality video w/o stuttering. I test encode some 30 secs mp4 files from my .avi files as well as some movies from my DVD using the trial version of Kinoma Producer. I vary it between 200kb and 480kb compression and 15-25 frames/sec, and I could not get Kinoma EX 3 to play any of them w/o stuttering. The only files it would play without stuttering is a .pdb files using h263 format. So for me, trying to get mp4 files to play on the Garmin Ique 3600 is a waste of time but a learning experience none the less.
 
OK Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen! I am happy to announce some movie-on-Palm OS PDA happiness.

I've experimented with a few softwares and settings (Thanks much to everyone who's suggestions and solutions have helped this come about) and I've come to some sort of wonderful conclusion. Much trial-and-error commenced, but finally something that works well is do-able.

My set-up: Mac OS X v. 10.3.8, TapWave Zodiac2, ffmpegX and plenty of Teen Titans, Justice League, and various other films and clips. Oh yeah, MMPlayer for the player. And another MMPlayer offering, videosize for conversion approximations.

My settings on ffmpegX:

Video Codec: Xvid [.AVI] (ffmpeg) (check "Encode Video")
Video Bitrate: 200 kbit/s, and with videosize's help, I put the episode of Teen Titans at 22 min. and the target size at 30 MB (even though it eventually comes to about 42 MB.)

Video Parameters:
Video Size: 320 x 240
Autosize: 3:2
Framerate: 15


Audio Codec: .MP3 (check "Encode Audio")

Audio Parameters:
Audio Bitrate: 64 kbit/s
Sampling: 22050 Hz
Channels: Mono

Options:
I check to enable: "High Quality", "Use B-frames", and "Two-pass encoding".

I leave the "Filters" and "Tools" tabs alone in ffmepgX because I haven't gotten the video-resizing stones just yet to delve into playing with these, but if you guys can shed any light on the subject, then maybe I'll play with them at some point. Otherwise, I'll just go on encoding and watching wonderful content on my Zodiac2.

Then I hit "Encode" and, many minutes later, I have something ready to send over to my Zodiac2. I use the MissingSync app. to mount my SD card to the desktop, but any card reader works just as well. I send the converted video over to the SD card and then I open up MMPlayer to play with the settings.

Video Settings:
Window zoom: 1x
Fullscreen zoom: 3/2x
Rotation: Follow GUI

And after setting up a playlist of content from my 1GB SD card, I lean back and watch my content in relative peace and happiness. The landscape orientation of the Zodiac2 looks great and the zooming feature allows me to save some MB's on the conversion, but still get some good quality on the handheld. I'm having a few issues with some "bugs" (I'm not sure if they're really bugs or just me not doing the software right) in MMPlayer. I guess that I'll have to experiment more on this aspect of it, but for now I'm so happy to have gotten to this step.

So there we have it. Thanks to everyone here in this thread and in the PM's who suggested settings and softwares. And the MMPlayer forums are good, too, for other helpful hints or links to yet other threads of video re-sizing goodness. Hopefully these settings help other people, and I'm curious to know what you guys might change or further customize for yet more better video on the Palm. I haven't yet done any "live action" content, just animation so far, but I'm planning on converting some actual movies (and for added complexity, subtitles.) Any suggestions are appreciated, as always.

Gotta go back to the converting work, but I just wanted to check in. Hope you're all well.
POL9A
 
Forget Kinoma

MM player blows it away.

Full length movies on a 256mb sd card, 480x320 widescreen on a T3 and plays standard DIVX files.

No convertion required (unless framerate and image size is too large)

Movies can only go on a card but you need the ram in the unit for other things, thats what the cards are for!
 
Hey EZ,

Well, there are two opinions on the subject, mine and the fix-it shop's.

Mine: I think that some software I downloaded (perhaps in regards to making these movies squeeze onto the Palm) somehow corrupted (perhaps to their maybe beta nature) something somewhere and I started noticing malfeasance. That's what I think.

The Fix-it Shop's: My hard drive died due to use and normal wear-and-tear. They said it failed the "Smart Test" that shows how healthy a hard drive is. (To be fair, it did sound kinda smart to me, it is an iMac G3 400 from 2000, so it was due for a failing.) Now, it could also be a case of them just selling me on a new hard drive when it was actually some corrupted files, but either way now I have a new HD (ooooohh! 20GB's!!) and a clean system with which to make in my image.

Which brings us back around full circle. With my "new" iMac, I can resume the search and quest for Palm movies.

But even better, I just got a new 15-inch Powerbook with all kinds of bells-and-whistles so now I may be able to explore some of these other solutions. I'll check on it for the good of us all.

Hard work + clean living = shiny new Powerbook.
It's about time.
POL9A
 
Hey egarc,

I wanted you to know that I DID try your file before I was left stranded without a computer, but since the end was near, I couldn't evaluate it and report my findings.

I love it (and VLC is a nifty program, too.) Now, how do we incorporate something like this to the PDA? Will MMPlayer read this? Just a transfer from Mac to SD card and all is well?

I feel a breakthrough is on the horizon.
POL9A
 
Uh Oh, POL has finally lost it.:D

The screenshots look good, how's the sound?

Maybe you can link to a complete video so we can, er test... My kids are partial to Teen Titans.:D
 
POL- Great news. Just wanted to point out why you would be getting 42mb vids, not 30.... Basically the 30 is not taking into account the audio.
200 (video) + 64 (audio) = 264Kbits/s bitrate. 264/8=33Kbytes/s. 33*60= 1.980Megabytes/minute. 1.980*22minutes= 43.560MB. So the size is pretty much bang on 2 meg/min.

Few things to try- for 64kbps audio, you could easily double that sampling from 22,050 to 44,100. Keep everything else the same, but try that- you should notice quite a difference.

Another thing to try. Try 412x316 video size (or 400x300) and then don't use the 3x2 zoom at fullscreen in mmplayer.
If you can have fullscreen zoom at 1x1 (window zoom at 1/2), then you should have MUCH better quality :) Again, all other settings can stay the same, including the 200kbps video bitrate.
 
Goodness. Here comes all that math I said I'd never use in school. Oh well, I love flipping burgers. :p (I'm kidding. I don't flip burgers.)

OK. Knowing these types of things now is a good thing. Seeing as how I've already converted 1.1 million videos at the old settings (I'm a real go-getter) I think that I'll try these new settings on the next batch of videos and if it passes the test, then I'll re-encode the previous 1.1 million. (I exaggerate. It's really more like 1 million.)

I think that these new settings will help me when I done encooding animation and start in on the live action videos. I can live with a certain amount of pixellation in the animation, but not in "City of God." Speaking of which, have any of you gone into the realm of subtitles? I've read some posts here and there and people seem to have trouble getting the subtitles to show up, or they're out of sync, or they drop off after half the movies passed... Any tips I should watch out for before I get deep into it? Or should I just blaze the trail for our future generations?

Hope all is well.
POL9A
 
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