Moar Vids! Mplayer (Video), Kronos (Text Advent), Battlejewels (Ac

[Esn]

P.S. Although if I do ever need to re-encode something, I use this awesome program. Too bad it's closed-source... (though someone could copy the GUI, in theory...)

http://www.avidemux.org/ will do that job nicely.

While avidemux does the job it's not exactly user friendly. Handbrake is a good tool for transcoding newbs or for people who don't want to spend hours fiddling around with documentation.

Neither of those comes close to the intuitive and economical organization of the SUPER GUI, I'm sad to say.

EDIT: On the other hand... looks like some people who installed the newest version are reporting virus infections. Yikes. Yet Softpedia gives it a clean rating. :unsure: I guess that's why open-source is generally more trustworthy. It has such a nice GUI, though...

 

[pder]

The best programs I've found for video encoding are the scripts xvidenc and h264enc. The scripts use mencoder for the encoding and are fairly easy to use, but they offer a lot of flexibility if you need it.

xvidenc
h264enc

 

[Alpha2]

Okay so we DO have VLC already prep'd and ready for launch! (*Begins ripping DVD collection)

On the hypothetical side, do you suppose hardware acceleration will ever make 720p play back (dosent have to be h264) possible? and if so how far off does it look to be before it's enabled?

 

[willrandship]

Why do so many people want hd???

Pandora LCD = 800x480
TV = 640x480 MAX, on my tv 512x384 is much clearer, near perfect size. Widescreen may come even closer to completely filling it.
720p = almost double pandora resolution so you get a worse image through scaling/cropping
1080p = Ridiculous

HD will look worse and run slower on the Pandora.

 

[lulzfish]

BECUZE HD IS A REVOLUTION IN VIDEO COMPUTER MOGRAPHICS ZMOG

I only have like .. 2 DVDs, that I actually own. Well, one. One's borrowed. I'm just going to re-rip them at 800 by 480.

 

[Pleng]

Willrandship the reason has been given plenty of times if you care to read the thread.

People aren't worried about having a higher quality image; they simply don't want to have to re-encode all their video files just to watch them on the Pandora.

Personally I'm pretty lucky because all my rips are DVD-res divx's which the Pandora should be able to play without any issues. But if my collection was in a higher quality format I'd just want to copy them on to an SD card before I leave in the morning and have the Pandora play them, without having to plan my viewing in advance and waste time re-encoding the files all the time.

 

[Alpha2]

Why do so many people want hd???

Pandora LCD = 800x480
TV = 640x480 MAX, on my tv 512x384 is much clearer, near perfect size. Widescreen may come even closer to completely filling it.
720p = almost double pandora resolution so you get a worse image through scaling/cropping
1080p = Ridiculous

HD will look worse and run slower on the Pandora.

Pleng has it right on the nose.

Go to any bit torrent or DDL site for your answer. Almost every downloadable video out there is at least 720p nowadays (if you even ASK for an AVI these days people give you the stink eye), so if people are forced to re-encode everything then they might as well watch buy a cheap Chinese MP4 player or a PSP/ipod/etc. The hope here is to make it as convenient a device as possible within reason. No 1280p isnt necessary and seriously beyond being a realistic request but 720 isnt.

 

[Awakening]

Being an anime fan myself less and less subbing groups are releasing in 480p avi these days and I currently don't have the hardware to do re-encoding. My laptop does 720p mkv fine so I haven't had a reason to re-encode anything and I hope that stays the same when I get my Pandora. Sooner or later pretty much all videos will be in 720p.

 

[mali]

HD will look worse and run slower on the Pandora.

DSP accelerated HD will run fast on Pandora. IIRC 720p was at around 15% CPU on Beagleboard running on DSP.

 

[Yod4z]

HD will look worse and run slower on the Pandora.

DSP accelerated HD will run fast on Pandora. IIRC 720p was at around 15% CPU on Beagleboard running on DSP.

720p xvid (MPEG 4) IIRC not 720p H264 (MPEG4 AVC)

 

[mali]

^I've got no clue about video stuff, I just saw it on beagleboard.org a while ago.

ED said, that he will beta-test the apps in the repo and report issues to the devs. Maybe they plan to add them to a Pandora feed then.

Edit:
Off topic but interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH4ZSpehNQw
DSP-accelerated GStreamer on Beagle Board taking only 11% CPU
http://beagleboard.org/

I did a short search, that came up with this:
http://omappedia.org/wiki/OpenMAX_Project

 

[EvilDragon]

Yep, you can be sure it will happen, no worries.
The stuff exists, it just takes time to implement it.

I'd say the Pandora OS will enhance QUITE a lot during the next few months

 

[Aninhumer]

I find that 720p downscaled can often look better than 480p/DVD versions, at least for official encodes (pirates tend to do it right...)

I'd point out that a lot of the H.264 decoders I'm seeing are talking about Baseline profile, which will not cover most anime fansubs, for example.

That said there's still probably a lot of work that can go into these things, and we may yet have 720p H.264 playing fine.

 

[WizardStan]

ok, just tried a 720p x264 encoded video on my beagleboard. It was loading for 10 minutes (like, the mmc daemon was at 25% <edit>CPU usage</edit> opening the file) before I finally got tired of it and tried to kill it. It had the effect of knocking me offline and making it very hard to log back in to kill mplayer. So I still don't know how well it would play such an encoded video.
A 720x576 DivX AVI played just fine at about 40% though (even though it complained my system was too slow. I'm all "WTF, I'm watching it right now, and you've got CPU to spare, how can it be too slow?"). That's about half the pixels of a 720p video, so if I had a 720p DivX encoded video, it would probably work, maybe. Don't quote me on that, CPU speed probably doesn't scale linearly with the pixel resolution.

edit: also, unoptimized mplayer was used, with SDL as the output. Could probably get a lot better with framebuffer instead.