[picard]

BetaPlayer: http://beta.topcat.hu

[picard]

BetaPlayer: http://beta.topcat.hu

[torok]

Originally Posted by klinux

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.

Try using Windows Media Encoder instead of Divx. The whole world goes off about how good xVid and Divx are, but they both look like total crap at low bitrates compared to windows media. In tests I've done Windows Media at half the bitrate looks as good as xVid. Also, ALWAYS use a variable bitrate. The automatic software won't do it, you have to get your hands dirty.

http://pkulak.com/tutorial.php

[conflagrare]

Originally Posted by torok

Try using Windows Media Encoder instead of Divx. The whole world goes off about how good xVid and Divx are, but they both look like total crap at low bitrates compared to windows media. In tests I've done Windows Media at half the bitrate looks as good as xVid. Also, ALWAYS use a variable bitrate. The automatic software won't do it, you have to get your hands dirty.

http://pkulak.com/tutorial.php

argh. I will NOT use Windows Media Encoder if anything then to stop them from dominating the codec world also. I would sooner re-encode all my videos into rmvb before I use Windows Encoder!

[jeffmd]

wmv is the better low bitrate codec.. and when I say low bitrates, I mean those suitable for streaming, or fitting 5 movies into 256 megs. WMV is just built better for not mistaking noise as new image data to be saved in P frames, and dynamic fps scaling so it can do things like cut off frame rates to preserve image clarity.

But the PPC player sucks.. and the WMV format is extreamly un-userfriendly when it comes down to the fact that a) your stuck using microsofts simplistic encoder to create them and b) editing movies in wmv is near impossible. usualy you need to recompress back into avi.

[jonathanchoo]

I agree that this might be a flaw in WMP. The quality are quite bad when compared to DivX at higher bitrates. My h4150 using BetaPlayer can handle 1300kbps, 25fps as does my T3 (MMPlayer) when set at 320x240 resolution video although at lower bitrates (400kbps) I noticed WMP have better quality when compared to 400kbps DivX.

I would not encode all my videos/audios in WMV and WMA format. I rather stick with DivX for my videos and OggVorbis for my audios so I can freely switch platform whenever I want to without wasting my CPU time to re-encode all my videos again.

[elehcdn]

I am using PocketTV to watch MPEG2 from a 1 GB CF card. For me, on my iPaq 2215 the image quality is pretty good. I do have a limitation of about an hour and 45 mins on the card, though.

[jeffmd]

#1 what are you playing mpeg2 with?

#2 you do know mpeg2 is a pretty sad compression? it gives hq video at gigantic bitrates (dvd) but you can accomplish the same results in 1/4 the space with divx. mpeg2 is alive and kicking because there is money behind it, but there is a reason you don't see "rips" stay in mpeg2 form. its just not good.

[dineshmj]

Hello Jason,

The PDA operating system (Pocket PC 2003 SE or WM 5.0) is capable to "request" its "display" device to render images in 24-bit, but since most of the displays are 16-bit capable only, they render the images from the OS in 16-bit, thus losing several colors in the process.

For example, when you have a photo taken in SONY digital still camera copied on to a PDA, the PDA software would be able to show the image in 16-bit only, thus giving an inferior rendering of the "available digital information".

The SOTI Pocket Controller does not "scan" the PDA screen. Rather, it gets the images directly from the PDA operating system through the ActiveSync application. Thus, it would be able to show the pictures in the best possible colours the source image material has.

In your test, if you viewed the sunset video on a Desktop PC and a PDA together, you can note that the video rendering so very much inferior to the desktop one.

Thanks,

Dinesh M Jayadevan

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

I'm a big digital video enthusiast, so I dream in 8000 Kbps data streams. 8) I'm a big stickler for quality, and I'm always pushing the limits on the quality of video playback on mobile devices. So the issue of video quality on the Pocket PC has been bugging me for a long time. I've ignored it/put off testing it for several years, but when I was testing the video playback on the X30 (it's awesome for video!) I had enough of this issue decided to dig deeper.

So here's what I did: I took the same video clip and played it on my Pocket PC and on my desktop PC. The desktop PC was set at both 16-bit and 32-bit colour, while the Pocket PC was in the only mode it has: 16-bit. The sample is below, and depending on how sensitive you are to these things, you'll either notice the problem right away or wonder what I'm talking about... :lol:



So What Are We Looking at Anyway?
The video sample in question is 320 x 240, 24-bit colour, and at a 250 kbps data rate. I took the screenshots for the desktop computer with the video playing in Windows Media Player 10 Technical beta. For the Pocket PC, I was playing the video on the Dell Axim X30 and I took a screen capture using SOTI Pocket Controller. I was initially concerned that Pocket Controller was changing the video image, but I compared the screen shot with the video on the Pocket PC screen and they look identical.

So what do we see in these images? The 32-bit desktop image looks perfect, because the video source is in 24-bit colour and there's enough colours to display it properly. When the desktop PC is in 16-bit colour mode, you can see some visual distortions, commonly called "banding". Gradiated colour is notoriously difficult to reproduce accurately if you don't have enough colours to work with. The Pocket PC is in 16-bit colour, so it should look the same as the desktop PC sample in 16-bit colour, right? Unfortunately that's not the case.

The Pocket PC sample looks significantly worse than the 16-bit desktop sample. The banding is much worse - it's almost as if it's not really 16-bit colour! The differences are even more apparent on the bigger version of the sample I created. I'm still in the process of searching for the right power charger for my 12-bit colour XDA in order to do some testing, because I'm beginning to think that Windows Media Player is displaying the video in 12-bit colour. That's only 4096 colours as opposed to the 65,000 colours that 16-bit colour has to offer.