Converting Movies for the Pandora?

[FaeMinx]

A few days ago I got myself a cute little 1TB usb-powered WD My Passport drive (Black).


http://goo.gl/WKicI


So I'm in the process of filling it all the media I could possibly want to experience on my Pandora. (No more having to pick and choose what to put on my growing collection of USB Flash drives :rolleyes: ).


I have lots of DVD movies that I've shrunk down to about 4.5Gb each and saved as ISO's on another drive. I only have a Windows 7 machine, and I was wondering what software I could use to convert them to a format that would make them much smaller and play nicely on the Pandora (without really losing much image quality).


If you are not familiar with Windows software, what should I be looking for? - What resolution would be ideal for a balance of small file size and good image quality? - Which file format?

 

[iprice]

Handbrake is good for conversion and someone here created a pre-set that gets the best out of it specifically for the Pandora. It's around here somewhere. I'll have a looksee on my laptop for it too. Hold on a mo...


[EDIT] Yep, lookee here -

 

[FaeMinx]

Awesome! Thanks.

 

[mcobit]

Can't smplayer or vlc open the isos directly?


If you have enough space there might be no reason to convert at all.

 

[FaeMinx]

^ Ooo... I didn't know that! I'm copying one over to try now...


Still, @ 4.5Gb per movie... I'll have to make them smaller *eventually*.


Edit:


Ok, so niether SMPlayer2 or VLC could read my ISOs.


However, SMPlayer2 allows you to read a DVD from a folder... So a simple matter of extracting the contents of the iso into an appropriately named folder did the trick


- It's not ideal, as there is no menu navigation and everything on the disk will play in whatever sequence it feels like.


It's still pretty cool though.

 

[mcobit]

Hmmm. I am pretty sure that my ubuntu vm lets me play isos directly with menu and all. Maybe ask the smplayer2 dev if he can integrate this feature.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

I compiled kino for SL4P (but not tested it).

 

[Kumaki]

Well...if one does what I have done for my Pandy, there's no real need to smallify them.


All your programs are on one SD Card. All your Media...music/movies, etc. on the second SD Card.


Just change out the SD Cards as needed for whatever movies you want. You could still put 7-8 movies on one 32GB SD card.

 

[FaeMinx]

^ I've been doing something similar for the last couple of years, except that I would load usb flash drives with movies/series... both my 32Gb Sd Cards are almost full with what I would call essential software / roms.


Even so, I only have about 1 3rd of my music collection, 1 game installed via Qemu (StarCraft+Broodwar 1.2Gb) and about 2 3rds of my Playstation collection. The purpose of the high capacity 1TB usb miniHD was so I could put everything Pandora related in one easily transportable location. As it is, I'm sure I'm going to end up filling the whole 931Gb. - maybe have about 100Gb to spare if I'm lucky.


So you can see, it is very worthwhile to make the files as small as possible... It would be nice to have enough space left that I could easily copy content from whichever friend I happen to be visiting.


(I'll probably be buying anothe mini 1TB drive in a year - or more likely a 2Tb or 3Tb one).


@mcobit: I'll probably do that sometime today when I get a moment.


@Linux-SWAT: Getting SL4P is still right at the top of my wish list... unfortunately I can only afford about 2.5Gb of Data download per month. A while ago another community member had kindly offered to post it to me on a disc (along with a few other tid-bits), but for some reason he appears to have become inactive in the community.

 

[Abanest]

Are mkv files playable on the Pandora? Out of all the movies/tv shows I have 'acquired' over the years, anything mkv related is the only thing I have been unable to get working on my Pandy without converting. Other than that it's been a great portable movie machine!

 

[Linux-SWAT]

@Linux-SWAT: Getting SL4P is still right at the top of my wish list... unfortunately I can only afford about 2.5Gb of Data download per month. A while ago another community member had kindly offered to post it to me on a disc (along with a few other tid-bits), but for some reason he appears to have become inactive in the community.

Once i go stable, remember me to send it to you.


I can burn a dvd with the rootfs + all compiled packages.

 

[FaeMinx]

Once i go stable, remember me to send it to you.


I can burn a dvd with the rootfs + all compiled packages.

That would be fantastic!


I certainly will, thank you so much!