I have to agree with Jason - I am a sucker for quality and have found that in general WMP is not up to the job - betaplayer is now on a new version and I can not recomend it highly enough - check out the free Matrix test videos and be prepared to be blown away. The benchmark util also rocks. I have found that it is best to fully exit all programs when using any media player and turn off the radio if your PPC is phone edition.
I also believe DVD pocket studio encodes directly into Xvid which can be read by this player.
Your opening statements lead me to believe otherwise. In any case, please try what I've recommended, from one video buff to another.
Sure, I'll give that a try, but my point was that the visual artifacts from low bit rates look completely different from colour dithering/banding, that's all. :-)
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Simple, dont use WMP, recode the vids for Betaplayer
If you're suggesting that the colour banding is because of the video format (WMV), that doesn't make any sense - the video file is of pristine quality and looks great on the desktop. If the limitation is the 16-bit colour on the Pocket PC, all video players will have the same problem. If, however, the problem is with WMP, then another player might do the trick. I'll check it out!
The problem IS WMP which to my knoledge outputs only in 12 bit colour, even on CE based hardware that have more then 16bit colour.
I'm not certain what you're expecting in terms of quality given the portable medium you're trying it on. Limitations and Portability go hand in hand...
Sure, I'm very much aware of that, but I don't think I'm asking for all that much: I just want great quality video. :-)
Then buy a Portable Media Center or portable DVD player. It's a fact of life that two things nailed together almost never do something as well as the individual parts did. Audio geeks don't buy all-in-one stereo systems for a reason. The more stuff you make the PPC do, the more compromises are going to be made on the individual components to keep them affordable and portable.
I'm not saying you aren't justified in wanting excellent video. But another is justified in wanting better audio, and another in wanting faster processing, and another in better connectivity and on and on. Technology advances will unlikely get the quality you want into the PPC, but that will be accompanied by quality enhancements in full sized/dedicated platforms that will still make you dissappointed in the smaller rendition.
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I'm not certain what you're expecting in terms of quality given the portable medium you're trying it on. Limitations and Portability go hand in hand...
Sure, I'm very much aware of that, but I don't think I'm asking for all that much: I just want great quality video. :-)
Then buy a Portable Media Center or portable DVD player. It's a fact of life that two things nailed together almost never do something as well as the individual parts did. Audio geeks don't buy all-in-one stereo systems for a reason. The more stuff you make the PPC do, the more compromises are going to be made on the individual components to keep them affordable and portable.
While I understand your viewpoint, I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect better from WMP. Considering that the PPC platform has been dominantly 16-bit (with exception for the legacy iPaqs) for quite some time, is it really that farfetched to expect WMP to output in 16-bits? Technically speaking, it shouldn't be a hardware modification that is needed to make this work (afterall, Jason's not complaining about a lack of 32-bit support or 8000Kb/sec streaming capability).
This is about colour dithering, and perhaps a flaw in WMP.
hmmm...although I can see why you would want better quality video and possibly expect it, why would this necisarrily be a flaw.
Dithering a 24bit video down to 16bit takes up alot of processing power and while your PC might beable to handle it, that doesn't say your PPC can (or PPC WMV supports it) my answer would be to re-encode the video in 16bit with dithering enabled in the endcoding.
This is about colour dithering, and perhaps a flaw in WMP.
hmmm...although I can see why you would want better quality video and possibly expect it, why would this necisarrily be a flaw.
Dithering a 24bit video down to 16bit takes up alot of processing power and while your PC might beable to handle it, that doesn't say your PPC can (or PPC WMV supports it) my answer would be to re-encode the video in 16bit with dithering enabled in the endcoding.
Your answer seems to suggest that you know WMV does indeed support 16-bit playback (just not the ability to dither down to 16-bit). Do you know this to be true or is that just a suggestion?
Being a video/audio nut, I can wholy see the flaws the pocket pc has. how ever out of my entire list of "wants and needs" for pocket pc video playback, 24 bit color isnt high on it. The reason is the screen size and resolution hardly makes the color loss noticable. Also as some have pointed out.. you should get the latest betaplayer if you havnt. banding can be reduced significantly with a good dither routien and betaplayers barly uses up any additional cpu power.
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