Video Is Playing Horribly Bad

[Xanas]

I reencoded all the videos with badak, and it's really ok, so I guess I can stop me whinin for the most part.

It isn't like you can see a difference at the display resolution anyway. And if you have a decent machine you'll re-encode single or 2-pass in like 100-250 fps, so it takes about a minute to reencode most things.

I tried both 200 and 250 bitrate in badak and 2-pass and 1-pass and both were fine.

 

[rx_shorty]

Good to hear!
Now it is just a waiting time for a good app

 

[forgeflow]

I'm sure a lot of folks here know this, but for those who don't -- not all video files are created equal. Its not just about bitrates and resolutions - encoder features have a lot to do with how well your videos play back. The more complex encoding features, the harder the playback device has to work to decode the file. It's not just the Wiz - every video playback device on the market has some upper limit on file resolution, bandwidth, and encoder features that you must be mindful of to create files for the device that play back well.

I'm a command-line kind of guy, so I use Mencoder ( part of the Mplayer project http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html ). Here is a simple command line for Mencoder that will give you high quality playback on the Wiz.

mencoder -of avi -sws 9 -vf scale=320:-10,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=0:br=160:cbr -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=1500:vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:v4mv:trell:threads=2 -ffourcc DIVX -o result.avi source.mkv

(change source.mkv to whatever your source file is, and result.avi to whatever you want the movie file called.) If the source is a .wmv file, you will probably have to add a frame rate command to the line (-ofps 30000/1001 for video, -ofps 24000/1001 for film, or -ofps 25 for PAL stuff).

Hope this helps.

 

[slaanesh]

Screw it, I think I'd rather just continue using my GP2X for divx movies and PSP for mp4 if they are more capable of playing them.

 

[Xanas]

If it's seriously because that mencoder commandline is too difficult for you then you should try badak, it will let you batch a ton of files and the default configuration is just fine. Badak is a front-end for mencoder.

 

[Jayles]

Dman, if I have to reencode my videos, I'm not interested in the wiz

I'll wait a little for a better player, because i'm not able to make one myself (a port of mplayer would be great).

 

[sam fisher]

The GP2x has a scaling chip and also some hardware decoding of the video files but it also had a stupidly low battery life because of it. Be glad your Wiz will last so long playing videos and don't complain so much when it stutters when playing videos at twice the screens resolution .

 

[fettouhi]

.

Maybe, but I can play family guy and etc. on my Creative Zen Vision:M without any converting whatsoever without stuttering and skipping. I was hoping that the Wiz would be able to do that at least with its video player.

Regards

André

 

[sam fisher]

The Creative Zen Vision:M likely has a lot of dedicated hardware to do this. Plus, more money to throw to devs to optimize their player.

 

[fettouhi]

The Creative Zen Vision:M likely has a lot of dedicated hardware to do this. Plus, more money to throw to devs to optimize their player.

Yeah, you're probably right. A shame though.

Regards

André

 

[dusoft]

mencoder -of avi -sws 9 -vf scale=320:-10,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=0:br=160:cbr -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=1500:vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:v4mv:trell:threads=2 -ffourcc DIVX -o result.avi source.mkv

tried vbitrate=600. Looks fine.

 

[sbock]

The problems are gone since firmware 1.0.1. There is no need to re-encode anymore.

Regards,
Stephan

 

[dusoft]

The problems are gone since firmware 1.0.1. There is no need to re-encode anymore.

The less expansive decoding is(lower bitrate than needed, lower resolution than needed), the longer Wiz will last.

 

[RupeeClock]

Not to mention that optimising the video for playback also saves a lot of space on your SD card.
A standard half hour show at 640 by 480, Xvid is usually 175mb.
Cut the resolution by half (which is actually a quarter as big) will save a lot of space.
So at the same bitrate and framerate, you should be able to store 4 times as much video.

 

[dusoft]

will save a lot of space.
So at the same bitrate and framerate, you should be able to store 4 times as much video.

There is no need to keep the bitrate when cutting resolution by half.
Keeping the bitrate will keep the file size.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Cut the resolution by half (which is actually a quarter as big"] will save a lot of space.
So at the same bitrate and framerate, you should be able to store 4 times as much video.

There is no need to keep the bitrate when cutting resolution by half.
Keeping the bitrate will keep the file size.[/quote]No it won't, cutting the resolution will cut the file size. It's also true that lowering the bit rate will also cut the file size, doing both will reduce the file size a lot.

 

[dusoft]

Cut the resolution by half (which is actually a quarter as big"] will save a lot of space.
So at the same bitrate and framerate, you should be able to store 4 times as much video.

There is no need to keep the bitrate when cutting resolution by half.
Keeping the bitrate will keep the file size.

No it won't, cutting the resolution will cut the file size. It's also true that lowering the bit rate will also cut the file size, doing both will reduce the file size a lot.[/quote]When I recoded movie with original bitrate of avg 1200kbit and 480x368 resolution to 320x240 with same bitrate size decrease was only 20 megabytes(original was 240mb), 10%. But when I recoded to 320x240 and avg 600kbit bitrate, resulting file size was 120mb. Does it say something? Or am I doing something wrong?

 

[vsviridov]

By looking at the file names it looks like the player is a version of CoreCodec TCPMP video player. And that thing was capable of playing non-converted video straight from the torrents (700Mb video file for 1.5 hours of playback) on my Palm T|X. It's quite surprising that Wiz fails to deliver, considering T|X's processor is a 312MHz XScale. Though, upon close inspection XScale does seem to have multimedia capabilities...

 

[sbock]

Do you read my post? The problem is solved since firmware 1.0.1.

Regards,
Stephan

 

[forgeflow]

No it won't, cutting the resolution will cut the file size. It's also true that lowering the bit rate will also cut the file size, doing both will reduce the file size a lot.

Bitrate means just what it says on the box: its the rate of the bits per second used to encode the data. Bitrate doesn't care what the resolution is, or what the framerate is. If you tell a video encoder to use 700kbps to encode a video, its going to do a better job on a file with less resolution, or slower frame rate, than on a file with a larger resolution for faster framerate, but it's going to use 700k per second to do the job, because that's what you asked for. (There is an upper limit to this, of course - an encoder will not use more bits than necessary to encode a frame.) So, simply changing the resolution without changing the bitrate will have very little effect on the final file size. You have to change both.
It should be pointed out that even though 320 x 240 is one quarter of the pixels of 640 x 480, you cannot reasonably only use one quarter of the bitrate to encode it. The reason for this is that each pixel in the smaller video is more likely to be "different" than it's neighbours in the larger resolution version - the details are closer together. Another way of thinking of it is that each pixel in the smaller video has more "work" to do than the pixels in the larger video. So, at best you might be able to reduce the bitrate to a third or half before you start seeing unwanted artifacts in the output video.