DVD on Palm?

[†Justice â€]

Couple of notes on this. 20fps is not too high for the T3 generally, although with the resolution you are using it would stuggle to play it. However, I would advise agaisnt using 20fps. I don't know what your vids look like, but I would predict it takes much longer than really needed to encode (due to construction of frames just to abnormal frame rate). This may also mean the output video is not as good as it could be. I would recommend you try full 25fps and see if it works.
Only other thing is the audio setting. 40Kbits/44Khz/stereo would probably sound quite funny during music playback. I would recommend you try mono (trust me, it won't make it sound worse!) or if you want stereo make it 22,050Hz not 44,100Hz.

They are just a couple of suggestions, you may find they do not work for you, but see what you think anyway.
iiicRuled.

*SLAP* I forgot something else important with the encoding in PocketDivXEncoder (THIS IS UNRELATED TO THE ABOVE REPLY TO MSPADARO). If you check the "B Frames" option in PDXE, you will get higher quality for lower bitrates. But when using 12.5fps (i.e. on T2/TT) don't use this. If you are however playing 25Fps vids with no problems, you could try BFrames, (NOTE it does use a bit more CPU, so if your PDA struggles to play a vid, don't use Bframes.)
The upside of bframes is, you can have higher quality for same bitrate, or you can even lower the bitrate for the same quality..
If anyone want the frame types explaining I can, but I don't want to bore you. (e.g. BFrames is Bi-Directional frames which means bla bla....)

[gmanmustang]

10x for Kinoma. That's a great reason to use the other.

I found that 15fps worked and works best.

OVERCLOCKING! Yeah, Baby . . . the T3 is "actual" 387MHz but I don't think (unlike iiic's "old days" I'd try overclocking a T3.

Afterburner on my 505 got clock speed to 42MHz from 33, and made a HELL OF A DIFFERENCE. I don't think tweaking (at high risk) the T3 from 387 to, say, 450, would make much diff anyway.

This point will be moot in a year - we'll probably have 750+Mhz (but a probably cost of GREAT video and NO BUSINESS APPS still working, if OS6 is as "prohibitive" as I think it will be for older apps).

I'm going to try it iiic's way and see what happens. I love the TMPG thing and it's unfortunate it's not "free" anymore - my free one allows for MPEG3 but (I believe) NOT MPEG4; it seems to work fine with Kinoma however for cropping and color/brightness changes. I'm very curious as to how the finished product will look with iiic"s suggested app - but I always use 15fps although Kinoma "tests" show sometimes a 40-50 fps rate on the loaded clips (??).

[Soumik]

hello iiicRules:

Actually the video looks great with the t3 openned and widescreen position. I will try it with 25 fps just for the fun of it.
I have used mono and stereo and both are fine, but stereo does use much more memory.

Now my question to you.,if I am encoding a 2 hour movie, how much time does it take with the program you are using?
Well I guess the PC you are using will have soemthing to do with it too.
But I would like to know so I can judge with mine.
Like I said a 2 hour movies is completed in about 2 1/ 2 hours with pocke dvd.

mas

[Stul]

I don't think MMPlayer is designed to run on anything less than a T3. I've used all the encoding suggestions here to no avail -- I still get the same error message about frame rate...sometimes further into the video sometimes near the beginning. If I try to skip around in the video using the slider bar, I not only quickly get the frame rate message, but I frequently get a critical error that requires a soft reset of my T2!

I tried reducing both the video and audio quality down to 1, setting the frame rate at 12.5, 10, and even 8 (very bad video, and still the frame rate message). I get this whether running the video from the fastest SD card on the market or running it locally in Palm memory. I've even tried reducing the picture size down to the size of a postage stamp, and still get the error message.

I think in the end, despite the fact that I love the smaller file size, I just have to realize that MMPlayer is not for the T2 and learn to live with larger video files and Kinoma. I guess I can apply the $15 I would've spent on MMPlayer toward the latest version of Kinoma or maybe just a bigger SD card!

Thanks for all the tips, though! By the way, I definitely think you should make some sort of sticky FAQ if you ever get the time. You have an impressive amount of knowledge on this! I know I'd use it in the future when I eventually get up off the wallet and buy a used T3 off Ebay (when they've come out with the T6, of course!)

[Sherri R]

Hey Chris (pilot):
Hold on. I have a zire 71, which has the same processor. I run mmplayer w/o a problem. So don?t despair. let me see how I can use it with pocket dvd and I will let you know.
I haven?t had enough time to try it with the pocket dvd encoding, but I have used it with AVI files and it works fine.

What type of card do you have 256?
I need to see if you can drop a 2 hour movie on that. I think you can. if I succeed I will let you know about the settings.


mas

[vid_a_lou]

Yes, I have three different 256mb SD cards that I used to only use in my Panasonic digicam. Two are full 10mb/s cards (all ways -- read, write, etc.) and one is some weird combination/compromise of a 2mb/s and 10mb/s card (I think it only reads as 10mb/s but records at something less). Anyway, I've tried all three of them. I don't know what speed the Palm SD slot supports, but these are very fast cards so I doubt it's the cards.

My T2 has close to 20mb RAM free (can't get to the iiicRules recommended 25mb free, as the T2 only has a total of 32mb of RAM!) , and I'm not running any hacks or other modifications of any kind except that I am running LauncherX. Not sure if that matters -- it hasn't for anything else I've tried to run.

I downloaded and tried TealMovie (both the player for the Palm and the Maker app for Windows), and it seems like a pretty good compromise between MMPlayer and Kinoma, although I have no idea what codec TealMovie is using. It does take a while to encode/convert to Palm (much longer than the PocketDivXEncoder), and the end-product file sizes are nothing to brag about. I suspect it's probably something similar to the Kinoma. If I cannot get MMPlayer working properly, then I'll have to make a decision on whether or not to buy the Kinoma Producer upgrade or TealMovie. The Kinoma upgrade offered a LOT more options for encoding than the original Kinoma Producer that came with my T2 (framerate, bitrate, etc.). I was able to reduce the quality of the video/audio some and get my file size down to 26mb for 11 minutes, and the quality was very acceptable. Admittedly not as good as what I got with MMPlayer and PocketDivXEncoder, but I also don't get a framerate error message (haha)!

Thanks for any info you can provide from trying this with your Zire!

[aishie`]

MMPlayer was written before the T3 was released, so believe me, it was written to play on the T2!


Huh? Where did I say this?! I don't have that much space on my T3! My TT (16MB ram) played MMPlayer files. I just recommed a decent buffer which requires some space, but I forget the limitations of the T2. Try using an older version of MMPlayer.
TIP FROM PILOT:
The following settings are good for T2 usage:
Audio Buffer: 64kb
Video Buffer: 256kb
Performance Warnings: Off (all of them)

First encode one file, using audio 1 and video 5 at 12.5fps, and with just VHQ and "Create an avi..." ticked under advanced options. Then encode a second file, again with audio 1 and video 5 quality and 12.5 fps. BUT this time, tick VHQ "Create an avi...." AND B-Frames. Put these two file on your SD card.
Then please download 0.2.8 from MMPlayer.com (it's on the homepage), and using the above buffers (with warnings turned off) try both files. I'd be really interested to see if the Bframes one plays, if the other still doesn't.
Then please get 0.2.9 and set the buffers again with warnings turned off, try each file.
These two versions of MMPlayer have funny things about them, so please try the above out, and then let me know how it goes. Don't give up just yet!


Cards will have no bearing on this. The tiny file sizes mean only a tiny bandwidth is needed. No SD card is so slow it can't transfer at 174Kbps.


Stereo should only use more memory if you increase the bitrate. I was recommending keeping the bitrate identical (40kbps) and changing to mono, as I think you will find this improves quality a lot as well as using less CPU power.
2 and a half hours for a 2 hour movie sounds fair if you are encoding from DVD. I wouldn't expect much more than realtime encoding on my 2.6Ghz P4. (Realtime means it's encoding for e.g. 1 sec every second. So 1hour would take and hour to encode etc..) Realtime is generally slow though, but from MPEG2 (which includes DVDs) you can't expect much more due to the colour conversion process which slows it down no end. However, if I was to re-encode a programme I captured of the TV in DivX format (so I'm encoding from a DivX file) using PocketDivXEncoder, as there is no colour conversion, it is seriously fast. I get over 5x realtime (about 130fps encoding.) So at that speed, I could encode 2 hours in just over 20 minutes.


Yes, I believe it would be at least ten times smaller for same quality, although I'm not quoting fact- quality is obviously based on opinion, not everyone likes the output of one specific codec. As DivX is quoted to be able to squash and MPEG2 file to a tenth of the size with negligable quality loss, and as MPEG 2 is much more advanced than Cinepak, I dare say it would be much more than a 10x size difference for same quality, but don't quote me!

I don't think I'm gonna be up for overclocking my T3 at least until it's out of warranty. But I feel as TT/T2s have been underclocked 175 to 144, that putting them back to 175 is not really overclocking atall- just "un-underclocking"! So I'd be happier doing that, as you're not clocking it faster than it was made for!
True about the new PDAs. With 600Mhz PPCs out now, Palm will soon have to follow suit, probably in their next batch of PDAs. But as you said, we'll have to see what Cobalt brings.....
Yeah give my PocketDivXEncoder a go, and see what happens. Try full fps (default setting so you don't need to enter an fps rate) but do tick Bframes. Then with Bframes, you can adjust the Bframes skip slider in MMPlayer if it doesn't play....

iiicRuled

[CJMax]

Hope this discussion ain't closed now. New to forum but happened upon this discussion. Tried Kinoma and Teal (latter has some kind of file-size/length limit on producer) and followed the misc. advice here - registering latest MMplayer, GK auto, DVD decrypter, pocket divx encoder etc. And because mines a T/T lots of fiddling to makesure bitrate and frames allright etc.

And indeed, got Master and Commander 2hours plus and Nemo (for my 6 year old) -ok it's nice and pretty for me too- on my 500mb card. BUT sound is almost inaudible. Magnus suggests using volume bar, T/T audio patch from Palm and setting vol. higher in encoder. Done all that -to no avail. Really quiet, even on earphones. ANY ideas/tips welcome. BTW - this is my first "forum" and I like the relaxed chat. A break from the day-job.hh

[AVDADDY]

Welcome! I'm glad that you were able to get it working. I'm not surprised the volume is low, but I am surprised that the suggested methods to solve it haven't worked.
Has you actually tried boosting the volume in PocketDivXEncoder? If not, try it and when I say boost, I mean boost! Set the boost to 320% for starters and see what happens.

I suspect however that your real problem lies with the Amplifier built in to MMPlayer. It may have got minimised by accident...
You may be using a skin which either doesn't label the amp or doesn't even have the amp, so I would suggest switching to the default skin (only temporarily) to set the amp volume. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend using the default skin all the time as some people find it causes problems with video playback...This may be solved by now however; I must admit I haven't downloaded the latest release yet.) Anyway, once you're on the default skin, you should see a slider labelled "Amp". It is extremely powerful so there is a mechanism to stop it being dragged too high by accident. You must keep dragging it up bit by bit, and it will slowly move. Once it's 2/3rds of the way up, try your movie. Keep upping the amp until you can easily hear the sound on the movie. (Obviously throughout this, make sure you keep the volume up, at maybe 75%). The amp is so powerful, this really should solve the problems. Be careful when using headphones though- don't listen to a quiet movie with headphones, then load an mp3 without putting the amp down first! I'd also strongly recommend that you don't use headphones while trying out the above method..
Anyway, hope that helped. Let me know how it goes.
iiicRuled
P.S. Nemo is awesome

[ClothesRus]

Thanks very much for prompt response. I'll post news of outcome. And I'll try the boost during encoding first. I thought 50% was reasonable and on 100% got an error on the vid that mm reported as an audio fault -but I now think that was another setting mistake as the error was not repeated. Thanks for the help -and yes -Nemo is a good choice for mini-viewing as the colours are so vibrant and the definition so sharp. My small child is entranced as I write this - it could be bliss on the motorway for a change.