New to GP32, questions about its capabilities

[Rrilltrae]

Alright... I have always had trouble ripping and compressing things, mainly because my tv card doesn't appreciate v-dub. Because of this i have little working experience.

Most of the full length movies that i have fit onto a cd at the highest quality, and i can pack them down to about 200-300 if i try really hard. My question is, taken down to 128, and played at 15 fps, how good does this look? I can appreciate the system for its emulation at the foremost, but i was hoping to be able to use it as a decent video player as well. I can drool all day over beautiful graphics on its released games, but if the anime episodes i want to watch won't have the same quality, i'd like to know before i get too excited.

Also, is the only reason you need to convert existing files to crunch the fps rate? I wasn't quite clear on whether any of my existing divx or avi's will play on this. Sorry to sound stupid, but i only heard of this from a recent magazine article. Thanks for your help

 

[khephren]

The new movie player can produce outstanding results, it's storage space that is the problem. If you are willing to span a movie over 2 128MB cards, you would get close to DVD picture quality. Frame rate is never going to be the same as a PC though. expect between 12 and 15 (enough to full the eye) depending on the original frame rate after decimation. Sound quality can get pretty good. If you want to see what the quality can be, just compress a movie using one of the GPcinema guides (not Moviepark, it isn't as good), and play it back on your PC, the results will be similar.
I don't think many of your existing AVI's will play, for several reasons:

They are probably compressed with something other than DivX 4.12/Xvid so they won't play

The resolution is probably bigger than the GP's screen.

The frame rate is perhaps to high for the GP.

Hope this helps.

 

[Don Miguel]

i'd better find any gp32 user nearby and check everyting yourself 8)

gp32 plays anime really cool!

it plays movies even better than some other pocket pc devices

 

[jlebrech]

Ive played star wars on it its pretty good. even the fight between obi wan and darth vader is pretty good, maybe ill have to encode episode 1 to it to see how good it does that cos the saber scene has more action.

 

[ralp99]

2 SMC cards for near DVD quality sounds like a great deal to me!!

 

[klay51]

I managed to fit a Simpsons episode to 15 fps really good quality at 35-40mb. And if you don't mind it being a tad more pixelated than about 20 mb. And if u really don't care about quality at all then 10mb. However, for live actions shows and movies the quality loss is more noticceable.

 

[Dozer]

Yeah, i got a near perfect simpsons episode at 25 megs. I think 10 fps at the most is excellent for something like the simpsons so thats where i cut down on size. I also used an v. good quality origional file (over 300megs for 1 episode).

 

[King Loz]

Are there any alternatives to Virtual Dub out there? It would be great if there was a one-button GP32 convertor for all the simpletons out there like myself. Load the file and click convertor, simple! in my dreams anyway...

Also, when using virtual dub my file sizes often come out lareger than when they went it, should i cahnge the frame rate to something like 12fps in the configurations menu?

 

[Chip]

Are there any alternatives to Virtual Dub out there? It would be great if there was a one-button GP32 convertor for all the simpletons out there like myself. Load the file and click convertor, simple! in my dreams anyway...

Also, when using virtual dub my file sizes often come out lareger than when they went it, should i cahnge the frame rate to something like 12fps in the configurations menu?

VirtualDub is released under GNU public license. The source is available on sourceforge. It is certainly possible for someone to go in, rip out the important bits of code that handle the codecs and filters, and cobble them together with simple front end.

Let the user choose the frame rate, 1 pass or 2 (and automatically start the 2nd pass on 2 pass encoding), and the video bitrate. Maybe have 2 or 3 presets for min and max quantizer (animation and live action), 2 or 3 choices for audio bitrate, and a slider for brightness adjustment.

To be honest, doing conversions manually is not that tough once you get it down, but if you're not familiar with vdub it can be a bit intimidating. With the upcomming european release, perhaps a "user friendly" was to convert videos would be a great thing for all the newbies that will no doubt be asking the same questions every couple of days.

The source is in MS Visual C++. Any takers?

 

[NiN^_^NiN]

Actually there are frontends for Vdub that will do the settings for you so u could just select the file then it will open Vdub with the proper settings and make the new avi file then close when done. ^_^ Simple no? just need to make a frontend for it or try 1 of the frontends available.

h34r: