[klinux]

Originally Posted by Robb Bates

When I can fit four or five full length movies on my 256MB SD card, that's an accomplishment.

Four to five?! Wow, I ripped a 210 MB size DivX file of Finding Nemo @320 x 1xx (cannot recall the exact ratio) and it is only acceptable. Hard for me to imagine watching anything with lower bitrate than that.

[klinux]

Originally Posted by Robb Bates

When I can fit four or five full length movies on my 256MB SD card, that's an accomplishment.

Four to five?! Wow, I ripped a 210 MB size DivX file of Finding Nemo @320 x 1xx (cannot recall the exact ratio) and it is only acceptable. Hard for me to imagine watching anything with lower bitrate than that.

[Sven Johannsen]

Originally Posted by ekkie

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?

Doesn't it? Maybe you guys can tell 12 bit from 16 bit color at a glance. I probably could if it was the exact same screen on the same device, side by side. At least I could probably see the difference. None of those shots looked bad to me. Maybe you had to be there.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Originally Posted by Sven

Doesn't it? Maybe you guys can tell 12 bit from 16 bit color at a glance. I probably could if it was the exact same screen on the same device, side by side. At least I could probably see the difference. None of those shots looked bad to me. Maybe you had to be there.

All I have to go off of is the screenshots because I actually don't use WMP for video (I use BetaPlayer). As for whether the shots look good or bad is rather subjective to each person. I can certainly see a noticeable difference beween the two 16-bit shots (especially when looking at the enlarged versions) and looking at the shots, I probably would have made the same guess that Jason did (that WMP is playing back in 12-bits).

It is possible that (as another poster suggested), that PPCs don't possess the horsepower to properly dither from 24 to 16-bit. I also just had a flashback from 7-8 years ago of the original nVidia Riva 128 cards that came out for PC. They were blazing fast gaming cards, but known for horrible 16-bit dithering. Perhaps the issue is not the # of bits, but the dithering quality. If either is the case, then this might just be a case of us having to wait for better graphics processors.

But if the difference between the shots is indeed indicative of WMP playback being 12-bit instead of 16-bit, then I don't understand why it would be unreasonable to expect 16-bit playback.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Originally Posted by Sven

Maybe you guys can tell 12 bit from 16 bit color at a glance. I probably could if it was the exact same screen on the same device, side by side. At least I could probably see the difference. None of those shots looked bad to me. Maybe you had to be there.

I can see it straight away but then again I do a lot of digital photography so I am used to looking for flaws in picures in order to optimise them.

It's what you are used to I guess.

[Glisson]

I'm with Klinux. How could even 2 full length movies on a 256 MB card be viewable? I did a Matrix rip and even increased the quality a bit and although viewable it still had some serious pixelation during the "action" scenes. I do agree that there has to be some "give and take" when compressing video down however and find all of the samples Jason showed us acceptable. I also think if it says 16 bit it should look the same on all platforms. Either it's capeable of doing it or it's not and don't say it's somthing it's not.

Everyone thouroughly confused?!

Glisson

[Exempli Gratia]

I have a X3, and have been upset about the same kind of dithering shortfall. Oddly, I don't think I saw this on my old Tosh. e310 (WMP8 I think). Could it be a WMP9 thing? A Dell thing (don't see how). Have you had a chance to try this on the XDA you were mentioning (or other PPC)?

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Originally Posted by Glisson

I'm with Klinux. How could even 2 full length movies on a 256 MB card be viewable?

Video is like music... everyone has their levels of what they deem acceptable. I know some people refuse to listen to music encoded any lower than 160kbps while others can't tell the difference between 64kbps and 160kbps.

The other thing to consider with video is resolution and framerate. You can scale back the bitrate quite a bit by sacrificing either or both. I know many find 12fps quite acceptable and some others view their video in portrait mode.

For me personally, I don't like to sacrifice any of those items (my movies tend to range between 240-300MB), which is why I had to buy myself a 4GB MicroDrive! :twisted:

I did a Matrix rip and even increased the quality a bit and although viewable it still had some serious pixelation during the "action" scenes.

Are you ripping to WMV or to AVI (DivX)? If you use the latter, then I'd recommend ripping to variable bit rate video (multiple-passes). That will take care of pixelation during action sequences.

I do agree that there has to be some "give and take" when compressing video down however and find all of the samples Jason showed us acceptable.

I don't think any of us are really debating whether the shots Jason showed were of acceptable quality. The debate is in regards to the difference in quality seen when playing back the same video on the PC vs the PPC.

[picard]

i don't think WMP uses 12bit RGB. there is no sense in it, the color space conversion from YUV to RGB isn't faster with 12bit. i checked some screen captures on my WM2003 device and RGB values are consisted from 32 levels in each channel. And probably this is the reason for the difference with desktop: WMP uses only 15bit (green is 5 bit too). And I can confirm that WMP doesn't use dithering, which could eliminate those bandings.

BetaPlayer supports dithering. you can even turn it on/off to check the difference. There is one other option called 'Optimal Update' which will be renamed in next version to 'Slow Video Memory' because it only helps with slow video memory devices (like h2210), and in some cases decreases the quality. so on a X30 try disabling it.

ps: so i will raise a little the priority to support WMV in BetaPlayer there are many WMV users out there who don't want to use MPEG4...

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Originally Posted by picard

ps: so i will raise a little the priority to support WMV in BetaPlayer there are many WMV users out there who do want to use MPEG4...

8O 8O 8O

YOU ARE THE MAN PICARD!!!

[Jonathon Watkins]

Very good Picard. Could you post us a link for BetaPlayer for future reference? I'm always open to new options etc.