Favorite Video Encoding Settings

[backpackerx]

Hi all. I use VirtualDub for my divx encoding to play on pocketmvp. I get full screen fairly smooth video with my settings but know from reading other posts that you can get much better quality. What I'd like to see in this thread is people's favorite settings for mpeg, divx, and .wmv files since nearly everyone uses Media Player, PocketTV, or PocketMVP for playback. I know for one that I can't get full screen .wmv video to play right on media player using Media Encoder 9.

So, here's the space to show off your best tips and settings for any or all of these 3 formats. Maybe this will become a referrence thread for video encoding. Include the bitrate you use and what fps you get. Primarily looking for full screen 320x240 settings.

[Gerard]

This doesn't fit at all with your profile requirements, but you do mention WMV... so here's my current method. I don't have a DVD player (well, we do, but it's my girlfriend's notebook and the OS is Japanese, so I'd not have a clue how to get going with that), so I use an IREZ USBLive! cable to grab video from my ancient VCR, with an RCA>minijack cable to get the audio channel. I was always trying to tweak settings to get better video and fewer capture crashes, but it was very fussy, tolerable but barely so quality, and about 1MB/minute. Too big.
I'd been using WME 7.1 until this week, when I accidentally discovered that a great new WME had been installed to my PC when I updated WMP a few weeks ago. Silly me I guess, thinking MS would just install what I asked to install... Anyway, doing a bit of exploring, I found that the settings for dialup modem worked fine, with a bit of tinkering to reduce saturation, and then after grabbing a movie (a really incredible movie with Dennis Leary called 'Final') I ran it through the quick-repair option in ASF Tools to clean it up slightly. The resulting movie was 111 minutes long, and though the more action-filled scenes had framerates as low as 5fps for seconds at a time, the average framerate was 15.2fps. Audio was excellent. Here's a screenshot representing about average clarity.
http://www.luthier.ca/other/forum/final.jpg
Some contrasts and amounts of motion break it up a lot more, and some lighting and stillness makes for a near-perfect video. All in all, I am very happy.
The thing that makes me happiest of all with this new encoder is that these videos are better than my old ones, with better sound synch (most of that movie was almost exactly in synch, the best I've ever seen in WMV from any source), and especially the size; 250KB/minute! I put the whole movie into one 32MB MMC card, with about 2MB to spare.

[backpackerx]

Looks good Gerard. Have you tried Divx encoding and PocketMVP? I didn't like to watch video on my ppc until I used it. Now I get around 20fps all the time and full screen video that looks like I'm watching it on a portable dvd player if I have a good source. I encode to the 5.03 codec and set my frame rate to 24 if that's the original rate or I decimate every other frame if it's originally 30fps and it looks about as good as watching TV and doesn't have the smaller screen size I got with Media Player.

[Gerard]

I did have a few tries with DivX, last year, just on fatter downloaded clips I didn't want to waste a ton of CF space on but also wanted to keep at fairly high quality. There was some animation someone sent me in MPG too, fullscreen 320x240 and really clean. But I found that I couldn't get it to work at all, no matter that I must have installed at least 15 related codecs and programs to get it figured out. Seems the sort of thing best left to people with the patience for it, of which I am not one. I love figuring out Pocket PC stuff, getting at the roots of bugs in betas and the like, but playing around on a PC bores me silly. I hate the things. So a simple, GUI-based, click a few things and it's done encoding is all I want. This new encoder is doing that well enough for now. Maybe one day they'll improve on it, and I'll use that.
My IREZ cable was never recognised as a source feed by any of the MPEG or DivX programs I tried. That's the really big reason I'll not pursue that line. Since I want to be able to capture VHS stuff, and don't have a usable DVD player nor even the hard drive size to deal with the raw AVI files, it's a moot question for me. If there were a simple, direct-to-MPEG encoder I'd be willing to pay a small amount for it, but it seems that even that recent encoder to grab DVD movies needs massive hard drive space for the intermediate files, and there is no way I am buying any more PC hardware, not now and maybe not ever. I'm a Pocket PC guy, plain and simple. And if it's not dead simple getting a movie into my Pocket PC, it's not worth the effort. Better things to spend my time on, ya know?

[Kiyoshi]

I don't know if this is off-topic or not, but since you're probably the few people that use an e740 for video playback, I'm wondering what the playback is like? I see the comparisons on PDA Buyers Review (http://www.pdabuyersguide.com) but they don't reflect real world settings. Can you copy something like a 100+MB video file onto a CF or SD card without having it slowdown? I was wondering if it'd be a bandwith chokepoint. And how long can you watch a movie for until the battery's shot? Because buying a big CF card to store video might not be worth it if I can't even watch a full-length movie stored on it. I'm thinking of going with a 256MB CF card (or SD) and watching 20 minute TV shows, instead of a 512MB card and watching 2 hour movies.

[Gerard]

It's not the size of the video which determines the likelihood of buffering problems, but the bitrate. Depending on available memory, the player and codecs you use to encode the video, and the processor's effiency/clockrate, you will find that every device has a choke point for video quality. Everyone who encodes content for the PPC has played around with settings to make this work; it's not automatic. You can find compromises that work, and depending on how much time/money you are willing to throw at the problem you can even get pretty darned amazing movies into less than 100MB. For me, it's just beyond what I'm able/willing to spend right now, and so I am satisfied with putting a small resolution video together at about 25MB per 90 minutes of video.
There are services out there which will do the work for you, mailing you titles already encoded.

[backpackerx]

I don't know if this is off-topic or not, but since you're probably the few people that use an e740 for video playback, I'm wondering what the playback is like? I see the comparisons on PDA Buyers Review (http://www.pdabuyersguide.com) but they don't reflect real world settings. Can you copy something like a 100+MB video file onto a CF or SD card without having it slowdown? I was wondering if it'd be a bandwith chokepoint. And how long can you watch a movie for until the battery's shot? Because buying a big CF card to store video might not be worth it if I can't even watch a full-length movie stored on it. I'm thinking of going with a 256MB CF card (or SD) and watching 20 minute TV shows, instead of a 512MB card and watching 2 hour movies.

I use PocketMVP to play AVI and Divx files and use VirtualDub to convert to AVI. I use around a 200kbs and my Simpsons episodes are around 50Mb. This is 24fps and full screen 320x240 video. The frame rate is rock steady at 24 and the video quality is about what TV looks like if you get a good source video. I have an excellent copy of Monsters Inc. that is about 200Mb and crystal clear. A 256MB card will work fine for most 2hr movies if you convert them right. The 512Mb are not much more expensive though and worth the money if you want multimedia and much date in storage. My battery life is about 2hrs for movie watching--The Toshiba isn't very stellar in this category.

[Kiyoshi]

I've had Virtual Dub on my computer for a while, I tried to use it to make a VCD outta my .avi movies on my computer, but I gave up on it cuz of all the programs you needed to run the video through.

Well I found a little tutorial on how to do some video editing, and figured out how to change the framerate, bitrate, audio, and *gasp* the ever-important resizing (you'd think it'd be a gigantic button to do it but it's hiden away in filters). Anyways, do you just use a ton of audio compression, video compression, framerate, and a performance-tweaked bitrate to get the file so small? Or is there more to it?

And about the expansion cards, a 512MB card for about $100 is over my budget, I could spend that money a million other ways. 256MB will probably be enough if you can get TV episodes down so small.

And I was changing the framerate around, and discovered that the video will sort of "jump" and speed up for a few milliseconds to catch up with the audio. Is there a way to prevent this?

[backpackerx]

In Virtual Dub try these settings:

File: Open video file--pick the video you want to convert
Video: Filters--add the resize 320x240 and bicubic filtering.
Frame rate--if it's 24 or less leave it alone. If it's 30fps choose decimate by 2. Make sure that you don't pick a new frame rate or
audio may not sync.
Compression--Use the Divx 5.0.3 codec
Audio: Make sure full processing is on
Compression: Choose Mpeg-3 and 24kbit/s stereo

Then just choose File/Save as AVI and name the video and tell it where to save and it will start to convert it.

You can set this all up in about a minute when you know where to find the stuff.

You will need PocketMVP (freeware) to view the AVI files

Good luck

[Kiyoshi]

Thanks for the quick run through, I'm sure it'll work fine, but I am using Nimo Codec Pack so I can watch all my anime encoded in different versions of Divx, and I think it's missing the Divx 5.03 codec in it. It doesn't show up in the list for Video->Compression. I'm thinking of reinstalling regular Divx 5.03. Is that what I should do?

EDIT

I just reinstalled Divx 5.03 from some old website (Divx decided to upgrade to 5.05 while I was away). It's encoding it now and I'll probably watch the file on my computer later and see how the compression worked.

Sorry for completely changing the subject of this thread!

[Mitchybums]

I use the simple media encoder on windows XP and since I have a 128 mb caard, I try to keep the files around 100 mb. It's kinda messing around for it, but usualy I use 16kbs/22khz mono for sound and around 100 kb/s for video. I open the movie in media player, select the properties for the file, and then recalculate the dimensions for the screensize. I only have one done so far that uses the 320x240 fully, Total Recal, The rest is widescreen format, but it runs Fullscreen without any issuesor borders. And no hassle in encoding it rotated either, thats what put me off on the others.
I rather play divx/xvids over network or I re-encode them the right way.
Even playing these small movie files on the desktop isnt so bad, if run in a window, and video set to be on top.
Works good while surfing and stuff.

[grobin]

I capture a quite a few TV programs using my Dazzle DVCII capture card and usually capture them in mpeg-2 format (DVD compliant file) and author them onto DVD+R discs. I started wondering if I could shrink them and watch them on my PPC -- a Dell Axim X5 with PPC 2002 O.S.

I have seen NO mpeg-2 players for the PPC so I tried re-encoding them to mpeg-1. I generally got lousy results. Either poor quality or LOW frame rates ... Then I tried .wmv format from Microsoft ... with even lousier results ... I finally tried the Divx format (Divx 4.x) and ended up with really good results.

90 min of TV show (2 hour shows minus commercials) shrunk from about 4 gigs (720x480 mpeg-2 at approx. 7.1 mbs encoding rate) to just under 100 mb (320x240). Good quality, can show it horiz or vert on the Axim, looks like close to 30 fps (though the Divx player doesn't show frame rate and I can't say for sure what it really is). Very surprised at the good quality -- especially compared to .wmv and mpeg-1.

I used a 2 step process using the MovieStar editor that came with my Dazzle card. I converted the 7.1 mbs DVD compliant file to a mpeg-1 file ... changing the size to 320x240 and the bit rate to 4.7 mbs ... left audio alone ... ( this resulted in pretty big mpeg-1 file )

Then dropped this file into VirtualDub and :

Set the Frame rate decimation (under Frame rate on the Video menu) to "process every other frame (decimate by 2)"

Set BOTH audio and video to full processing

Used the Divx 4.12 codec and set the bit rate to 150 kbps ( 1 pass - slowest)

Set the audio compression using mpeg layer-3 codec at 32 kbit/s -24,000hz mono

Then I save it as an .avi (render it).

Voila! A divx .avi file under 100 mb (that I split innto 2 files for faster
loading into the Divx player)

A very nice way to take my TV movies with me portable !

It would be nice to do it in a single step - DVD mpeg-2 to divx - BUT I have seen NO free tools to do this and tried the Dr. Divx trial version without success. I'm sure someone will create a one step workable program in the near future BUT right now my 2 step process fills the bill ....

[grobin]

...
It would be nice to do it in a single step - DVD mpeg-2 to divx - BUT I have seen NO free tools to do this and tried the Dr. Divx trial version without success. I'm sure someone will create a one step workable program in the near future BUT right now my 2 step process fills the bill ....

Oops! I was looking around for the latest version of VirtualDub and found that there IS a vesion of it that will load mpeg-2 files!

And it works just fine -- one step from mpeg-2 to divx.avi with the same VirtualDub settings mentioned in my previous post.

http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/

[The PocketTV Team]

FYI:

We have made a Simple Guide for making MPEG files optimized for Pocket PC or Smartphone (http://forum.pocketmovies.net/viewtopic.php?p=3415#3415).

This Guide contains templates with parameters optimized for Pocket PC and Smartphone. Of course you can adjust the parameters for special cases.

MPEG files made using this Guide can be played by PocketTV or other players such as PocketDivX/PocketMVP.