Running Anime 720 Mkvs?

[Darksci]

Just wanted to ask a quick question. Would it be possible to run anime 720p mkv videos with subtitles on them?
And actually show them?

I heard the Pandora DSP can take care of the 720p bit but would mkv files be supported for this?

 

[WizardStan]

yes. MPlayer and VLC both support MKV with subtitles.

 

[Darksci]

So Hardware support will enable VLC and MPlayer to run 720p then right?

I thought VLC uses its own codec's to render video thou :S

 

[Spirit]

Unless the bitrate is too high I do not see any problem.

 

[Tozarian]

If it is just anime, the bitrate probably won't be as high.

 

[Kramy]

VLC uses the CPU exclusively, so 720p is unlikely. MPlayer tends to be more efficient. Once we get DSP codecs, all should be well.

And 480p of just about any format should be manageable by the CPU.

 

[Phawx]

For what it's worth, my i8910 seems to be OMAP 3430 even though I thought it was OMAP 3530. My phone records at 1280x720 at around 24fps. If there is a lot of motion is starts to drop a few frames. So I assume that if someone with the right know how were to try, they could get 720p playback from the Cortex A8. Obviously, the phone plays back the 720p video it records just fine.

However, the DSP would obviously be more appropriate so we could save on battery life.

 

[femngi]

Virtually all scene anime using the Makrosta (MKV) container is h.264 encoded, or equivalent. I think that would be by far the greater problem here. Fortunately most groups still release AVI with xvid encoded and hardcoded versions as well for people using XBMC and the like.
Sometimes I wish a group would release an MKV encoded in xvid just to confuse the shit out of people who don't know what a container is.

 

[Enverex]

H264 isn't a problem as MPlayer will play that format happily.

WizardStan: The initial question wasn't "can it play this file format?" it was "Can it play something that is such a high bitrate?".

I'd wait for the devs to chime in to get a good answer to this, as random people saying "yeah it should" honestly stands for nothing.

 

[Darksci]

Why would an mkv with H264 video be a problem O__O I thought the DSP was meant to accelerate those things?

The highest bitrate anime I have is: Macross Frontier 1GB episode for 35mins @ 4338Kbps using a H264 codec in an mkv container. (720p)

Now I could just about run it on my Atom umpc using CoreAVC using only the CPU.

 

[arrrgh]

Anything more than 480p is pointless on the Pandora... You could just reencode down to 480p and save a lot of space and processing power.

 

[Enverex]

Anything more than 480p is pointless on the Pandora... You could just reencode down to 480p and save a lot of space and processing power.

I'm against doing this, despite it being a good conservative option, mainly because firstly you lose quality by transcoding a lossy format and secondly it takes quite some time to transcode these files, so depending on how many you have, that can be a serious amount of time spent converting, it also means you can't simply just copy something over.

 

[Pleng]

it also means you can't simply just copy something over.

This is the point I think a lot of people who argue against HD on Pandora are missing. When I'm travelling I really don't *care* how something looks (within reason!) but I don't want to have to spend time re-encoding all my files. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and think "hmmm I fancy watching (South Park/Blackadder/Indiana Jones/whatever) on the train this morning" and be able to simply copy the files across without having to re-encode them.

 

[Jaylink]

720p mkv is possible yes, maybe it can take a while to get it right. take a look here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRI0NUaWko8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXr-D1wROfQ

720p eats indeed lots of cpu power.
To save the accu/battery power of the pandora it seems much beter to Re-encode all HD Content to 480p, so you can watch much more eps or movies then 1 or 2 in 720p resolution. and it also save space on your SD.
The difference between 480p and 720p on the pandora screen is hard to see.
and also the S-Video-out wont show those high resolutions.
Hopefully there will be an advance scartcable in the future for the pandora.
so we can enjoy almost HD quality.

 

[Darksci]

I've got lots of 720p videos, but converting them is a pain, which is what I had to do for my PSP.

Nothing is wrong with downscaling, its better than waiting 20 minutes to reencode an episode.

 

[Kramy]

Anything more than 480p is pointless on the Pandora... You could just reencode down to 480p and save a lot of space and processing power.

It's worth noting that this isn't absolutely correct. I've done tests of 480p, vs 1440x900 video, at the same bitrates. The 1440x900 video(Highest res FRAPS could record) looked better than the 480p video, when both were playing at the same resolution.

I believe that's because it can blur out more flat stuff like ground textures(this was a game), and then when resized the artifacts make it look like a low res ground texture. It spends more bits on maintaining quality of the important stuff. The downside is the increased CPU usage, resizing down after decoding.

If you're interested, take a look at what I uploaded to a random free webhost (with 10MB filesize limit) - it's only 512kbit. (One fourth of Youtube HD's bitrate)

http://vidplay.orgfr...om/k2_test.html

 

[Spirit]

Well, what resize algorithm did you use and which one does your player/display use?

 

[pelrun]

Exactly - if you're using a poor scaling algorithm prior to encoding (e.g. for real-time recording), but a good post-scaler in your media player, then your results will be distinctly skewed. IIRC Common video encoding wisdom holds that a lower-res video looks better than a higher-res one with a similar filesize when using HQ scaling algortithms.

And remember that game content has completely different kinds of detail to animation or video, and will stress non-game-specific codecs.

 

[WizardStan]

WizardStan: The initial question wasn't "can it play this file format?" it was "Can it play something that is such a high bitrate?".

Huh? Where did you get that? The original post:

Just wanted to ask a quick question. Would it be possible to run anime 720p mkv videos with subtitles on them?
And actually show them?

I heard the Pandora DSP can take care of the 720p bit but would mkv files be supported for this?

Seems like the original question was, in fact, "can it play this file format?" MKV is just a container. Both VLC and MPlayer recognize the container and will play it, subtitles and all. It says nothing about the codec used nor the bitrate it was encoded at. XVid/DivX encoding, even 720p and higher, should be a piece of cake for the Pandora to handle. Given that I've had my BeagleBoard playing 720p divx files with CPU to spare, I'd wager my left maple nut against it being otherwise on the Pandora. H264 may be a bigger problem. Unfortunately I've not got any to test with.

 

[Enverex]

WizardStan: The initial question wasn't "can it play this file format?" it was "Can it play something that is such a high bitrate?".

Huh? Where did you get that? The original post:

Just wanted to ask a quick question. Would it be possible to run anime 720p mkv videos with subtitles on them?
And actually show them?

I heard the Pandora DSP can take care of the 720p bit but would mkv files be supported for this?

Seems like the original question was, in fact, "can it play this file format?" MKV is just a container. Both VLC and MPlayer recognize the container and will play it, subtitles and all. It says nothing about the codec used nor the bitrate it was encoded at. XVid/DivX encoding, even 720p and higher, should be a piece of cake for the Pandora to handle. Given that I've had my BeagleBoard playing 720p divx files with CPU to spare, I'd wager my left maple nut against it being otherwise on the Pandora. H264 may be a bigger problem. Unfortunately I've not got any to test with.

720p is the physical image size (and therefore part of the encoding). Sure he didn't mention the encoding format but that's probably because he thought MKV was the encoding.

Glad to hear it should run them fine though.