Any Video Encoders To Be Available?

[cool1987]

Hi everyone,

As a few others i've been a lurker on these forums for awhile and i had a few questions that i couldn't satisfy with the search function (i've seen many chastised over this, lol!), so i thought i'd pose the first here.

If i want to make the most out of battery life for playing movies and i'm downloading all my content from the pandora, from say megaupload, rapidshare, will there be a video encoder available for converting to a smaller resolution so i can maximise even further the pandora's battery, or even use a different codec to make use of the hardware decoding. I'd like to know if this is a project that is underway, i'm not a linux user so i have no idea of any existing applications that may be ported, their names.

I realise that even without re-encoding that movie playback could be (i'm taking a guess here...) 7 hours maybe, just a wild guess, but i would like to eek every last bit out of the battery i can.

This will all be standard def videos, i'm not so much into high definition on small screen devices, little point really, unless there is no standard def version available.

I'm one of those people that likes the possibility of underclocking as well as the usual overclocking, so with the pandora i aim to get as much as i can on battery.

 

[eksasol]

I have some mp3 player that use rockbox to allow them to play video and I use WinFF to encode the video. They have encoding preset for many different portable devices and have support for mpg, xvid, and h264. Since the pandora resolution is 800x480, just choose the PSP preset and 16:9 for widescreen. You can manually set your bitrates, framerates and resolution too. It's one of the easiest to use software.

Basically from what I know H.264 performance on the pandora will need to be optimized, so I would stick with xvid in the beginning. Which is ideal anyway, because h.264 demands more processing power so it will drain the battery faster.

Since the screen is 4.3", you can live with the ipod 16:9 preset, or something like 320x240 at 500kbs to save battery. It wouldn't even make sense to encode videos at 800x480 because that's higher than the dvd resolution, unless you are encoding an hd video.

Why the heck are all my apostrophee exponentiating itself?

 

[cool1987]

I have some mp3 player that use rockbox to allow them to play video and I use WinFF to encode the video. They have encoding preset for many different portable devices and have support for mpg, xvid, and h264. Since the pandora resolution is 800x480, just choose the PSP preset and 16:9 for widescreen. You can manually set your bitrates, framerates and resolution too.

There are a lot of free softwares for encoding purpose, but WinFF is one of the easiest. It does batch encoding.

Basically from what I know H.264 performance on the pandora will need to be optimized, so I would stick with xvid in the beginning. Which is ideal anyway, because h.264 demands more processing power so it will drain the battery faster.

Since the screen is 4.3", you can live with encoding videos at 480x272 resolution and 600kbps. It wouldn't even make sense to encode videos at 800x480 becayse that's higher than the dvd resolution, unless you are encoding an hd video.

What i mean is a software that will run on the device itself, on the pandora, would this be possible, to eliminate the need of using a pc to do the conversion, do it all on the pandora?

 

[eksasol]

I think that's what they are doing now, optimizing the hardware accelleration, hopefully, also if the software is written so that it can utilize the graphic card in the pandora. One thing you can do is just use a less compressed type of videos like mpg which demand less processing power.

 

[sindbad]

What i mean is a software that will run on the device itself, on the pandora, would this be possible, to eliminate the need of using a pc to do the conversion, do it all on the pandora?
Yes. Look at Handbrake, there are other though. Most things that work on linux and are open source will work fine.
However, encoding will be significantly slower than on your desktop. The DSP may help, but nothing is really using it right now.

 

[bzar]

You could use something like ffmpeg or mencoder, but I seriously doubt you'll gain any battery life. The transcoding process itself is very cpu-intensive, and drains the battery as much as or more than just watching the video. But to answer your question, yes there are several trascoding tools to pick from.

 

[eksasol]

What i mean is a software that will run on the device itself, on the pandora, would this be possible, to eliminate the need of using a pc to do the conversion, do it all on the pandora?
Yes. Look at Handbrake, there are other though. Most things that work on linux and are open source will work fine.
However, encoding will be significantly slower than on your desktop. The DSP may help, but nothing is really using it right now.

To encode a video on the Pandora is overkill, although not if you plug it to an adaptor and is patience. Encoding videos takes a lot of processing power and will drain the battery very fast. Since the Pandora cpu is not very powerful it will also take a very long time. Not a good idea, although more practical if the cpu was a faster multicore one. Infact when I used Handbrake, I don't seem to find the multithread setting (someone can confirm me on this). But yes, there are some video encoding software for ARM architecture.

 

[Butterman]

I have some mp3 player that use rockbox to allow them to play video and I use WinFF to encode the video. They have encoding preset for many different portable devices and have support for mpg, xvid, and h264. Since the pandora resolution is 800x480, just choose the PSP preset and 16:9 for widescreen. You can manually set your bitrates, framerates and resolution too. It's one of the easiest to use software.

Basically from what I know H.264 performance on the pandora will need to be optimized, so I would stick with xvid in the beginning. Which is ideal anyway, because h.264 demands more processing power so it will drain the battery faster.

Since the screen is 4.3", you can live with the ipod 16:9 preset, or something like 320x240 at 500kbs to save battery. It wouldn't even make sense to encode videos at 800x480 because that''s higher than the dvd resolution, unless you are encoding an hd video.

Why the heck are all my apostrophee exponentiating itself?

Whatchu talkin bout? The Pandora screen is 16:9.

I don't see why you would need to be playing around recoding stuff, you're just going to lose quality. If you're ripping movies from DVDs, it's just best to xvid them and do nothing else.

You won't be held back by the battery life, if you're just watching movies it will be a real challenge to run the battery down.

 

[bzar]

I have some mp3 player that use rockbox to allow them to play video and I use WinFF to encode the video. They have encoding preset for many different portable devices and have support for mpg, xvid, and h264. Since the pandora resolution is 800x480, just choose the PSP preset and 16:9 for widescreen. You can manually set your bitrates, framerates and resolution too. It's one of the easiest to use software.

Basically from what I know H.264 performance on the pandora will need to be optimized, so I would stick with xvid in the beginning. Which is ideal anyway, because h.264 demands more processing power so it will drain the battery faster.

Since the screen is 4.3", you can live with the ipod 16:9 preset, or something like 320x240 at 500kbs to save battery. It wouldn''t even make sense to encode videos at 800x480 because that''''s higher than the dvd resolution, unless you are encoding an hd video.

Why the heck are all my apostrophee exponentiating itself?

Whatchu talkin bout? The Pandora screen is 16:9.

I don't see why you would need to be playing around recoding stuff, you're just going to lose quality. If you're ripping movies from DVDs, it's just best to xvid them and do nothing else.

You won't be held back by the battery life, if you're just watching movies it will be a real challenge to run the battery down.

4.3", 4.3 inches in diameter. Not 4:3 aspect ratio.

 

[GuSec]

With the new DSP drivers, Beagleboardowners can play full screen video and only use 10% of the CPU. If I'm not totally lost, this should increase the Pandora's battery life for video playback quite a bit.

 

[cool1987]

With the new DSP drivers, Beagleboardowners can play full screen video and only use 10% of the CPU. If I'm not totally lost, this should increase the Pandora's battery life for video playback quite a bit.

Yes. that's fantastic news, so i'm very happy at that for playback duration of movies.

As i imagine a few others on here i want to use the Pandora as a multi-machine, emulation, media player, umpc style, so battery life is paramount.

As there were alterations that had to be made to the case to accomodate the battery i'm wondering if there are still plans for an extended battery to be available, although that specific question i would pose in another thread.

I've agonised about what device to get, laptop/netbook or Pandora, the Asus N10j was an excellent contender as you can get a 9 cell battery and reported 10 hours of life on the machine on integrated graphics, but i'm going back to the Pandora as size is also a factor in my machine search, so with the wi-fi, bluetooth, battery life, size, and dedicated community..i don't think you can go wrong with a Pandora.

 

[Alpha2]

It;s all dependant on the movie though. If all you find are 720p H246 MKVs you might run into issues. While the codecs are being discovered now, there;s no gaurantee that the Pandora will be able to run every 720P video (a resolution that seems to be gaining popularity more and more for downloaded video.) If it;s a simple Xvid or Divx possibly MP4? you might not need to re encode a video even if it;s 720p, but good luck finding SDs.

I;m just glad I have a huge backlog of SD videos to watch as it feels more and more like newer ones will end up being out of reach without re-encoding.

 

[lulzfish]

Are there going to be DSP-accelerated Theora codecs somehow? Or Vorbis for that matter..
edit: I'm thinking of decoding here, actually.

 

[ldesnogu]

With the new DSP drivers, Beagleboardowners can play full screen video and only use 10% of the CPU. If I'm not totally lost, this should increase the Pandora's battery life for video playback quite a bit.

I don't think anyone knows how much power the DSP needs, it might be more than the CPU, though I doubt it

 

[Spirit]

Do you want to encode to a more battery-nice something ON the Pandora? That would be self-defeating as the encoding will eat much more power than the playback.

If you want to encode on your PC, well, then you use whatever encoder you got for any codec the Pandora supports. Examples have been mentioned above.

 

[cool1987]

Do you want to encode to a more battery-nice something ON the Pandora? That would be self-defeating as the encoding will eat much more power than the playback.

If you want to encode on your PC, well, then you use whatever encoder you got for any codec the Pandora supports. Examples have been mentioned above.

The idea is to be able to use the pandora as a multi-tool so encoding on the device was my original question yes, i didn't mention however that of course you'll have to run from the mains to do this as i have no doubt that it will be very batter consuming.

What i was getting at is the ability to use the Pandora as a workstation for encoding as well as a pc, you may be on your travels and for some reason might not be around a pc, with some videos from your digital camera ready, but too big to upload to email for example, so a video encoder on the go via Pandora is a good start.

 

[cb88]

@cools1987 in the news section there is uuh news that the beagleboard (pandora's next of kin ) has the DSP codecs working so there will proababy be a package to install has them

FYI the DSP codecs use like 15% of the CPU to playback HD xvid iirc and the rest of the load is put on the DSP dunno what the load was on it but probaby not 100% as far as speculating battery life while using the DSP its best to wait since there has been little testing in that area and the battery benches were with CPU at 100% not the DSP

also the DSP might/should be able to speed up encoding dunno if that worth pursuing though someone is bound to try

 

[lulzfish]

I think since the DSP is more specialized and gets more done with less instruction, we can expect it to use significantly less power than pure CPU decoding.
Otherwise, there would be very little point to having it.

And if it's as general-purpose as I've heard, it could certainly encode video as well, but that's probably not a priority since encoding only happens once, and you can have a desktop PC do it for you.

 

[cool1987]

I think since the DSP is more specialized and gets more done with less instruction, we can expect it to use significantly less power than pure CPU decoding.
Otherwise, there would be very little point to having it.

And if it's as general-purpose as I've heard, it could certainly encode video as well, but that's probably not a priority since encoding only happens once, and you can have a desktop PC do it for you.

I've seen the news regarding the beagleboard and the percentage of load put upon the various parts of the pandora, cpu, dsp, and so on.

To reiterrate, my point was to establish that it could be done all on the pandora, as its great to have a hand held that you can do almost everything you want without having to resort to using a desktop pc, it's about mobility and usability.

 

[lulzfish]

To reiterrate, my point was to establish that it could be done all on the pandora, as its great to have a hand held that you can do almost everything you want without having to resort to using a desktop pc, it's about mobility and usability.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they'll have something like mencoder for transcoding videos.