Is there really no good, commercial MPEG player?

[hamslay]

I've converted a few DVDs to MPEGs averaging 230Mb in size and I'm getting really frustrated trying to find a descent player.

PocketTV seems to crash like crazy on my 5450. Prior to entering a registration key it would only play after a reset if no other apps were run before it, even though it had 40Mb of RAM free. NowI've entered a key, it crashes every time with an error creating the menu!

I then tried PocketDivx, which does play the movies but very slowly and jumpy.

Next was PocketMVP, which is the best compromise so far. Quality of playback is great until you start jumping around within the movie, at which point the video and audio become out of sync by a fraction of a second. Bearable in an action film maybe, terrible for music films. Try watching a flamenco dancer when the foot taps sound quarter of a second after impact!

I then downloaded the only commercial player I've found, bundled with the Resco Picture Viewer. Quality is OK to poor, but I can't find a way of navigating through the movie, so pretty useful unless you plan to watch a film from beginning to end in one session. Once you stop it, you have to start from the beginning again!

With all these free products like PocketMP which are so nearly there I can't believe someone can't do a polished, supported, commercial player!

By the way, the reasons I don't want to use .wmv files with Windows Media Player are a) The quality seems lower than the MP3s b) It adds an extra task into the ripping process and c) I don't support Microsoft's avoidance of industry standards to force people into using their own products.

I just pray someone releases an MPEG player which can navigate through the movie AND stay in sync before my new 5450 is out of date!

[guinness]

You could try encoding the mpegs into Divx avi's that will play on PocketMVP decently at fullscreen (about 15 fps). I use a program called Virtual Dub, which allows for a few tricks that will free up some cpu cycles (like rotating the movie when encoding it rather than on the PPC). It's not perfect but it's free. Check out http://www.pocketmatrix.com for some tutiorials. Other than that, I don't consider a PPC to be much of a movie player right now, not powerfull enough. There is a pay-for version of Pocket TV, optimized for XScale-processors that apparently gets about another 3-4 fps on mpegs.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Yeah, I used to rip movies in MPG format, but for serious digital video files, you really should go with the PocketMVP and DivX encoded files. For comparisons, I've ripped video clips in both formats and the result is that my MPG files are about 30-40% larger, despite the fact that my DivX files support higher resolutions with smoother framerates and better soundquality.

The drawback is that there is a rather steep learning curve learning how to rip files to the DivX format. If you're interested, visit www.pocketmatrix.com and www.doom9.org.

[Rirath]

And if done right you should see some amazing fps with Divx.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

And if done right you should see some amazing fps with Divx.
Yeah, 25fps along with 96kbps/44.1KHz MP3 stereo sound without breaking a sweat...

[hamslay]

At what resolution ekkie?

My MPEGs are 25fps 240x136 while lets me use between 200 and 350kbps depending on the length of the movie and comes out on average around 240Mb.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I'll use the longest movie I have now as an example (since I only have one motion pic... the rest are music videos):

-resolution - 256x144 (resized perfectly for the 16:9 aspect ratio)
-sound - 96kbps/44.1KHz/16-bit stereo sound
-framerate - 20fps (this is a PAL movie, NTSC would give me 24fps)
-length - 1hr 43min
-size - 237MB
-less than 1 dropped frame per minute
-minimal visual artifacting (almost none at all)

My DivX movies are ripped to about 250kbps + sound. Visually, I find 250kbps on DivX equivalent or better than ~400kbps on MPG-Layer1 compression.

[hamslay]

ekkie, my first DivX has been a bit inconclusive. I just did a track from a music video which is 5 minutes in length at 200kbps, 320x176, mono sound. Picture quality was OK for such a large image, and better than the MPEGs would have done. Size was 9.5Mb. Increasing to 300kbps put the file to over 14Mb but gave no noticable visual gain. My main suprise/disappoint was the framerate - although I specified 25fps in framerate in virtualdub, PocketMVP reported 0 frames dropped and an average of 12.5fps!! Dunno why it halved my framerate :(

Btw, in the pocketmatrix tutorial it suggests exporting an AC3 audio track from DVD2AVI and then using HeadAC3he to convert it to WAV. Using the latest DVD2AVI, can't one just export straight to WAV and skip the AC3->WAV conversion stage?

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

ekkie, my first DivX has been a bit inconclusive. I just did a track from a music video which is 5 minutes in length at 200kbps, 320x176, mono sound. Picture quality was OK for such a large image, and better than the MPEGs would have done. Size was 9.5Mb. Increasing to 300kbps put the file to over 14Mb but gave no noticable visual gain. My main suprise/disappoint was the framerate - although I specified 25fps in framerate in virtualdub, PocketMVP reported 0 frames dropped and an average of 12.5fps!! Dunno why it halved my framerate :(

Btw, in the pocketmatrix tutorial it suggests exporting an AC3 audio track from DVD2AVI and then using HeadAC3he to convert it to WAV. Using the latest DVD2AVI, can't one just export straight to WAV and skip the AC3->WAV conversion stage?
I typically don't go to 320 sized resolution with my movies. I just don't think the PPC has powerful enough hardware to do it. The largest I'll go is *maybe* 288. Also, I don't notice that there's much visual benefit to mono sound versus stereo, so I just go stereo. With VDub, I never specify desire framerate, just the bitrate.

I've never had a movie halved in it's framerates, so either your source is wacky or there's something being skipped or misconfigured along the way. If you're ripping from an NTSC DVD, you should get 24kbps.

An export straight from AC3 to WAV is just a necessary evil. I couldn't tell you why it has to be a separate app, but that does take quite a bit of CPU power, so perhaps its best done independently.

Also, I don't remember what the PocketMatrix guide recommended, but I know I've read a few guides that recommend first converting the video twice from the VOB files... once to a temporary format... and then again to merge with the audio. I never do this. I prepare the audio into WAV files first and then convert the WAV files directly with the VOB files into the resultant AVI file.

Oh, and I'm using DivX 4.12...

[hamslay]

I'll have another look at the weekend, but I just reduced the size to 240x136 (again following the exact instructions in the pocketmatrix guide) and again I got 12.5 fps! During the encoding it was saying 25, but it doesn't come out as that on the player. Very odd. I don't know about the source being "wacky" - it's a "normal" DVD that plays fine.

Oh well. I'm getting so fed up with having spent 3 whole days making about 100 different AVIs, MPGs and WMVs that I'm totally sick of the damn movies anyway! Perhaps I'll stick to Solitaire! :)

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I'll have another look at the weekend, but I just reduced the size to 240x136 (again following the exact instructions in the pocketmatrix guide) and again I got 12.5 fps! During the encoding it was saying 25, but it doesn't come out as that on the player. Very odd. I don't know about the source being "wacky" - it's a "normal" DVD that plays fine.

Oh well. I'm getting so fed up with having spent 3 whole days making about 100 different AVIs, MPGs and WMVs that I'm totally sick of the damn movies anyway! Perhaps I'll stick to Solitaire! :)
Open up your AVI file using Virtual Dub and play the movie for a minute or two and then pause it. If you look at the progress slider, you'll notice that it shows you the elapsed time of the movie as well as the current frame #. Divide the frame number by the number of seconds that have elapsed. If it's still 12.5 fps (which I suspect it will be), something is going wrong with the actual rip (as opposed to the problem being with the PPC).

Are you doing a "Force Film" when in the DVD2AVI app? That may be what you're leaving out.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Oh well. I'm getting so fed up with having spent 3 whole days making about 100 different AVIs, MPGs and WMVs that I'm totally sick of the damn movies anyway! Perhaps I'll stick to Solitaire! :)

Hang in there... I wasted quite a bit of time myself sorting through all sorts of issues before finding a method that worked well.

If you're not doing it already, focus on just ripping brief segments of about a minute or two until you get it right.

[hamslay]

ekkie, you're right in that the movie does play back in virtualdub at 12/13fps.

I can't see why Force FILM would be required though, according to the pocketmatrix guide.

For the amount of working hours I've lost on this I just worked out I could have got on with my work and gone out this weekend and bought a portable DVD player!!! :D

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

ekkie, you're right in that the movie does play back in virtualdub at 12/13fps.

I can't see why Force FILM would be required though, according to the pocketmatrix guide.

For the amount of working hours I've lost on this I just worked out I could have got on with my work and gone out this weekend and bought a portable DVD player!!! :D
I'll have to take another look at that Pocketmatrix guide to see what might be tripping you up. I follow a different method than what's described there so I can tell you for sure what results you're supposed to get with their method.

I believe you regarding the missed opportunity to just get a portable DVD player... this is more fun though once you get it working right... it just requires consider time-investment initially.

[hamslay]

Hey ekkie, I just figured why I'm getting 12.5fps and it looks jerky! I followed this instruction in the PocketMatrix guide..

3. Make sure that Video --> Full processing mode is selected and go to Frame Rate...

Select Process every other frame (decimate by 2) and click OK. This will effectively reduce the number of frames by factor 2 without affecting video/audio synchronization; fewer frames means smaller filesize and less decoding effort for your PPC.


DOH! I just ignored that stage and video looks way better. My 5 minute, 9MB track ended up with Dropped:142, Played:8266, Avg FPS:24.57. Not bad at 320x176. The only thing I'm unhappy with now is the slight graininess and ghosting in areas where there is a lot of movement. Is that just a matter of whacking up the kbps (and living with the file size?) to improve the graininess?

Thanks for your perseverence by the way! :)

[hamslay]

OK, well I've gone up to 500kbps and the quality is now excellent, although far more frames are being lost.

Only 1 issue remaining now before I delete all my previous versions and redo everything as DivX - for some reason I can no longer navigate through the movie. If I drag the indicator through the film it stays there for a few seconds and then drops back to the start. It didn't do this with mpegs. Is there something in the way the file is encoded which contains the information needed to all navigation through the file?

[Buddha]

hamslay

1 Have you tried to drag the scroller a little further than you need to? Often when seeking in a divx you need to drag the scroller a little further, try scrolling towards the end of the movie for example and see what happens.

2 check in PocketMVP's settings that 'No AVI Index' is disabled

3 just for sports, check how many keyframes your divx has per seconde or per minute. If if that number is very low that could be why you can't seek, as when you seek you seek on keyframes

Keyframe are full frames, this has to do with the way divx works you have several type of frames explained in simple terms this means that keyframes are full frames that contain a full image and in between keyframes you have 'subframes' which only contain only the changes between each image. So when you seek in the movie you seek for each full image, but if there's almost none it can make seeking in your movie virtually inpossible.

It's unlikely that you've changed those settings but fyi its in the DivX5.02 codec properties panel in the 'General Parameters' bottom left under 'Max Keyframe interval' this should be set to 300 by default.

Oh and one last thing for playing your movies in PocketMVP(pocketdivx) in the configuration panel make sure you enable the 'Enable Cache' feature and set it as high as you can, this increases performance when you read from a storage media.
The previously mentioned 'No AVI index' is good to enable aswell to increase performance but you won't be able to seek in the movie decently with that options enabled. Choices, choices, choices :)

Good luck

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Oh and one last thing for playing your movies in PocketMVP(pocketdivx) in the configuration panel make sure you enable the 'Enable Cache' feature and set it as high as you can, this increases performance when you read from a storage media.
It's all a personal choice I guess, but I prefer not to 'Enable Cache'. From my experience, enabling the cache causes an extra delay upon loading a file (since it's loading up to several megabytes of video into cache first before it starts) and then with a movie larger than the cache size (which is likely), you will incur additional delays everytime the cache is emptied and needs to be refreshed (video stops and doesn't restart until the cache is completely refilled again). Finally you'll experience one more delay after the video is complete and you're returned to the "console" (as it's once again refilling its cache with the first several megabytes of your video).

Of course, there are positives, if you're experiencing dropped frames, this feature will alleviate that to an extent and the amount of access made to your storage media is minimized, thus preserving battery to an extent (this is really noticeable if you're using MicroDrives).

[hamslay]

ekkie, I think you might have just answered my question before I got to answer it! :)

I just got a fantastic copy of Ice Age running at 300kbps 320x176 in 195Mb and it look soooo good. There is just one downside, after about 5 minutes of perfect playback it froze for about 10 seconds and then carried on just fine again. Is this the cache? I was actually guessing at making it bigger, but maybe my 6Mb cache is the problem?

So much to learn, but this latest file blows away any of my previous MPEGs or WMVs. Cheers guys!

[Buddha]

Yes this could be due to the fact that the cache is enabled, try disabling it and check again. (although I must say I've never had those re-caching problems. I start a movie and it just keeps playing till the end :) )

If it is indeed caching during those 10 seconds increasing the cache will only make that time longer, so lowering might be better in your case.

[hamslay]

Damn! Just when I thought I'd got there. Even with the cache disabled it still stops in almost the same place (about 4 seconds different) 5 minutes into the movie) and then carries on. I wonder what it's doing?!?

:(

[Buddha]

Mmm.. try making making a new DivX of the same movie (just the first 10 minutes of it or so) and see if the problems still happens... it could be that there's something wrong in the divx (a little glitch during the encoding or something)

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Yes this could be due to the fact that the cache is enabled, try disabling it and check again. (although I must say I've never had those re-caching problems. I start a movie and it just keeps playing till the end :) )

If it is indeed caching during those 10 seconds increasing the cache will only make that time longer, so lowering might be better in your case.
I actually just disable it completely. With my current movies, I don't have any skip problems anyway. Interesting though that you haven't seen that same delay phenomena with caching.

I'll have to give that another try. If it plays right on to the end and it helps me play higher bitrate files (or conserve battery any), then maybe it's worth another look.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

BTW Hamslay, I just took a look at the PocketMatrix guide for creating DivX and I noticed that they use a special VFAPI converter to create "pseudo AVI files".

I'm not sure what the impact of this step is, but like I said before, I don't create any temporary video files between the VOB files and the final AVI.

I use DVD2AVI to just save an "AVI Project" file (I do have the "VFAPI plug-in enabled" though), which create the project file and an AC3 file. Once you convert that to a WAV file, you can just open the .d2v project directly from VirtualDub along with the WAV file. Compress the video and audio and enable the video filter needed to shrink your movie and then create the movie.

That's it.

[hamslay]

Well I turned ALL of the check boxes off, including the cache, and so far it's played 20 minutes with no breaks. Strange that having no cache at all makes it better, but there you go!

I don't know if there is any gain or loss through using the VFAPI converter - I just followed the instructions word for word (other than the decimate fps setting) and it seems to work just great. The other bit I would question is using Headac3he to create the WAV file. The version of DVD2AVI that I have has an output straight to WAV option on it. I don't know whether this file is "as good" as the one produced by Headac3he, and handles the 80ms or whatever delay, but it would certainly be nice to reduce the whole process to SmartRipper, DVD2AVI and then VirtualDub. I'll give it a go soon.

Fingers crossed that they lower the price of SD cards in the UK soon. Stuck at 240Mb for my movies, cos I only have the 1 256Mb card, anything over 100 minutes needs to use 250kbps bitrate or less, which introduces noticible graininess. If I could get a cheap 512Mb SD card (if they make them!) and use 500kbps for all movies I'd be a happy man! :D

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Sorry. Correction to my above post. I use a package called "Gordian Knot" which is available from http://www.doom9.org. Not a true standalone product per-se. It's really a combination of a bunch of products including DVD2AVI and VirtualDub.

Once the D2V file is created, I use GordianKnot to create a .avs project file, THEN I load it up into VirtualDub with the WAV file and rip.

Overall my methods are a combination of the PocketMatrix and the Doom9.org methods, which I think work better than both standalone.

I'm not sure if the framerate is still an issue or not. If it is, let me know, and I'll post in greater detail exactly what I'm doing. Just ripped X-men and it plays perfect with zero dropped frames at 24fps, 96bps/44.1KHz/16bit sound. Resolution is at 256pixels wide.

Good luck.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Yes this could be due to the fact that the cache is enabled, try disabling it and check again. (although I must say I've never had those re-caching problems. I start a movie and it just keeps playing till the end :) )
Gave it another try. The effects aren't as bad as originally reported (the first time I used this, I was streaming video over WiFi which would explain the unsightly delays).

However (and this may be device-specific -- I have an iPaq3870), while the movie did play without delays, I did notice stuttering in my movie during the times that the cache was being refilled. A 3 minute clip which normally shows 0-2 frames skipped with cache disabled, showed 88 frames skipped with cache enabled. This is with the cache being refreshed a total of three times during playback.

[Buddha]

and I noticed that they use a special VFAPI converter to create "pseudo AVI files".

I'm not sure what the impact of this step is, but like I said before

Ekkie,

What VFAPI-Conv does is basically making a 'dummy avi', which it makes based on the .D2V file. It make a sort of 'front-end' from the .d2v file so that the result is something you can open in almost any program that can open .AVI (VirtualDub in our case)
The .AVI you make with VFAPI-Conv and then open in virtualDub just 're-routes' the video frames in the .VOB files. So when virtualDub wants frame X what it does is get frame X from the VOB and spit it out to VirtualDub and making Vdub believe its actually the video frame of an .avi file. 'We call this process 'frame-serving'

It's the same when you make an .AVS file, this is a config file (dummy file) for another frameserver (which Gordian Knot uses) called AVIsynth. So when you open that in VDub, VDub is actualy 'talking' to AVIsynth, who will then relay the frames from the .VOB files.

So VFAPI doesn't make a temporary video file or stuff like that (where you would loose quality), it just act as a 'gateway' passing on video-frames.

[Buddha]

Well I turned ALL of the check boxes off, including the cache, and so far it's played 20 minutes with no breaks. Strange that having no cache at all makes it better, but there you go!

That is indeed a 'weird/ackward' result.

The other bit I would question is using Headac3he to create the WAV file. The version of DVD2AVI that I have has an output straight to WAV option on it. I don't know whether this file is "as good" as the one produced by Headac3he,

You have kind of given the answer to this one yourself: it's the quality, Headache and Bsweet give a better converted quality.
Since the sound of your DVD has often 6 audio-channels, we have to merge all those channels together down to 2 since an .MP3 or .MP2 only has 2 channels (left and right) this process is called 'downmixing' and headache is simply better than the integrated one in DVD2AVI for that task. :)

[Buddha]

However (and this may be device-specific -- I have an iPaq3870), while the movie did play without delays, I did notice stuttering in my movie during the times that the cache was being refilled.

I have an IPAQ3800 aswell :), yes some dropped frames is possible although my 'dropped frames' rate is much lower. I've just tested a 3min08sec 200kbps 320x176 Divx 23.98fps with 48kbps 44kHZ mono mp3 sound (filesize 5.24MB) read from the SD-slot in PocketDivX with cache enabled at 1MB (so that it would cache multiple times during the 5MB movie)
-The 1st time: A soft-reset first, I had 0 dropped frames,
-The 2nd time: I played the movies once more and I had 38 dropped frames,
-The 3rd time: I did a soft-reset first and had 18 dropped frames + the movie stopped once for a fraction of a second(???) heard weird click (i guess a one time glitch)
-The 4th time: A soft-reset first, 0 dropped frames
-The 5th time: A soft-reset first, 0 dropped frames
-The 6th time: I played the movie once more and I had 0 dropped frames

(I never want to see that movie clip again! 8O hehe )

===========================

There are two things I wanted to share:

1. I use PocketDivX 0.8j

I know that we have now reached 0.8p and the name has changed but this version works the best for me. Using newer versions gave me a problem when reading some movies from my CF card: The movie would stop somewhere along the line (random) and hang the movie. This only happened when reading from the CF card (so the CF card could be the cause), playing something from RAM was fine. Ogg playing can be a problem with 0.8j, but I use WinamPAQ for that or GSplayer2 so that's not an issue.

2. This is just a little quality/speed gain tip:
Movies are originally recorded at 24fps, when making NTSC DVD's they mess up the movie since they have to 'INVENT' 6 frames extra to reach the 30fps playing rate that NTSC has. I'm not gonna go into details about interlacing BUT I suggest when you have a NTSC Movie DVD (not a TVshowDVD) to use IVTC (inverse telecine) in VirtualDub (Can be found under File/Video/FrameRate, there at the bottom tick Reconstruct from fields - Adaptive )

"What does it do and why!?"
Well this brings the movie back to its original framerate of 24fps (23.98 to be precise) this means that per second we have 6 frames less to decode (24 instead of 30) which is good for the PPC.
AND we win the kilobits that would otherwise have been spent on those six frames. Thus a little gain in quality for the other remaining 24 frames.

You can do this in DVD2AVI aswell (the ForcedFILM option)
Don't use this for PAL movies.


Just wanted to let you know.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

What VFAPI-Conv does is basically making a 'dummy avi'
Cool. Having never tried that, I wasn't sure exactly what it was doing. I can see now how that would be helpful.

I have an IPAQ3800 aswell :), yes some dropped frames is possible although my 'dropped frames' rate is much lower. I've just tested a 3min08sec 200kbps 320x176 Divx 23.98fps with 48kbps 44kHZ mono mp3 sound (filesize 5.24MB) read from the SD-slot in PocketDivX with cache enabled at 1MB (so that it would cache multiple times during the 5MB movie)
So being an iPaq38xx owner, you probably know why all my movies are adjusted for their contrast and brightness (contrast 93% / brightness +30%) !! :) Too bad there's nothing I can do about the purple screen itself!!

I think my high number of dropped frames was due to both a larger cache size (3MB) and higher bitrate file (250kbps, 3min, 10MB file) with caching set to 3MB... would seem to imply that the program had more to refill while requiring more CPU power to process the current picture. My resolution was lower though (288x122) which would have balanced the CPU processing a bit... so it's all a give-and-take I guess.

My curiosity would be whether you do see increased performance boost with the caching enabled vs it being completely disabled. I have yet to see where it would help me (though I have heard this option is a must for MicroDrive owners in regards to battery conservation).

1. I use PocketDivX 0.8j... Using newer versions gave me a problem when reading some movies from my CF card: The movie would stop somewhere along the line (random) and hang the movie.
I just checked mine, it seems I have 0.8m. Having just recently started encoding movies, I have no other versions to compare to, but I have on random occasions seen a movie hang. Typically a soft-reset followed by opening the movie directly prevents it from doing so, but it's still an annoyance nonetheless.

2. This is just a little quality/speed gain tip:
Movies are originally recorded at 24fps, when making NTSC DVD's they mess up the movie since they have to 'INVENT' 6 frames extra to reach the 30fps playing rate that NTSC has. I'm not gonna go into details about interlacing BUT I suggest when you have a NTSC Movie DVD (not a TVshowDVD) to use IVTC (inverse telecine) in VirtualDub (Can be found under File/Video/FrameRate, there at the bottom tick Reconstruct from fields - Adaptive )
...
You can do this in DVD2AVI aswell (the ForcedFILM option)
Don't use this for PAL movies.
Good tip. I wish these guides would do a better job of explaining that. I've been using the ForcedFILM option by default now in DVD2AVI and it's worked well with all my movies, but as you pointed out, I noted the regular slow-fast movements with my PAL movies, I realized then that the extra frames taken away was attributing to this... It was trial-and-error for me. This explanation would have helped me understand all this up front.

Another thing I've discovered via trial-and-error is the "Maximum key frame interval" number within the DivX4.12 configuration screen (in VirtualDub). As I was watching the credits roll down on X-Men, I noticed the credits would slowly get more blurry (actually more of a smearing effect) then suddenly currect itself every ~12 seconds (I timed it), then remembered that the key frame interval had been set to 300 frames. I created a new AVI consisting of just the credits section with the KFI set to 15 frames and there was major improvement. However this does impact filesize significantly. Within the actual movie, I would occasionally see this smearing effect in action, but it happens so infrequently, I'm not sure if adjusting that KFI downward is worth the extra filesize.

[Buddha]

So being an iPaq38xx owner, you probably know why all my movies are adjusted for their contrast and brightness (contrast 93% / brightness +30%) !! Too bad there's nothing I can do about the purple screen itself!!

Yes I know it all too well ;) and me who doesn't like purple!

My curiosity would be whether you do see increased performance boost with the caching enabled vs it being completely disabled. I have yet to see where it would help me (though I have heard this option is a must for MicroDrive owners in regards to battery conservation).

No not really as I usually don't have many dropped frames with it enabled of disabled but this could be due to my lower bitrate aswell, since the bandwith is lower. In theory enabling caching could prevent some congestions when reading off a card at higher bitrates. The battery thing is true it helps conserve power as the microdrive doesn't have to keep spinning during the whole movie.

I just checked mine, it seems I have 0.8m. Having just recently started encoding movies, I have no other versions to compare to, but I have on random occasions seen a movie hang. Typically a soft-reset followed by opening the movie directly prevents it from doing so, but it's still an annoyance nonetheless.

I think this problem is really related to my card, but using 0.8j just solves it. I have about 10 versions of PocketDivX ranging from 0.7 to 0.8p. Pocketdivx always worked fine, till that problem surfaced and one day I was smart enough to think that it might be software related and tried out all versions one after the other backwards. As soon as I hit 0.8j everything worked fine again. If PocketMVP works fine on your machine no need to switch. :)

However this does impact filesize significantly. Within the actual movie, I would occasionally see this smearing effect in action, but it happens so infrequently, I'm not sure if adjusting that KFI downward is worth the extra filesize.

Yes very true, this is due to the way DivX works: between keyframes it only saves what changes in the image (so it doesn't save the whole video frame, just what changes in it and in doing so it saves precious kilobytes)
The more you lower the KFI the more full frames you get and the more the filesize will increase. Here just as with all other settings is a question of preference, but I find leaving in at 300 is ok. ( I don't watch titles on my ipaq anyway hehe, so I usually cut them, again saving a couple of MB's.) This setting was more important with older video codecs that didn't have VKI (variable keyframe interval) What this does is detect new scenes in a movie and automatically insert a keyframe at the start of each new scene, this improved quality greatly when it was introduced, before that you had to find a decent KFI in order to compensate for highspeed movies which have a lot more scene changes than say uhm...nothing hill.