Acer struggling to play even smallest vid file

[pheral]

I was hoping you guys had some pearls of wisdom to impart, because my Acer n311 is having a tough time playing the files i create for it. I'm trialling PocketDVD Studio, and creating vids on the worst quality setting for this.
Watching files of this quality in Media Player, it can just about cope with a small-screen image, although it tends to get worse as it plays and the longest test i tried froze after a certain amount of play time. If i even dare try watch anything on full-screen, it stutters its way through about 30 seconds of play, and then the Media Timer symbol flashes inbetween frames, and the whole thing screws up.

I've managed to get about 23MB of program memory free on my Acer... and i can't seem to free any more. Would uninstalling WizBar and PocketBreeze free more? Is that a normal amount of memory to have free, or am i missing something big?
Media Player just takes a huge chunk out of that memory... i neeed more! Does CorePlayer manage to make more economical use of the memory available? I could try that.
It seems rather unfair that i have a huge 4GB card and i'm having to make teeny files, and even then my Acer can't cope. And besides, i want to take advantage of this gorgeous VGA screen! Grr.

Any ideas? :D

[isajoo]

23 megs is not bad....i have around 35megs program and 8 megs storage memory free. all apps(wisbar also) are installed on flash rom disk not ram. try out tcpmp player...google it. it is the best/smoothest player. other wise reinstall apps on to flash rom. but 23 megs free should not cause major problems. just more is better.

[pheral]

Okay, i've just tried tcpmp, and it's no better. When i play the video at 50% it can just cope, with only a few stutters on some videos, and more on others. But at the point of playing the vid i have 14MB of main memory free... i would have thought that was enough to have at least the 50% size vids playing perfectly!

Hrm. You mentioned flash rom... i'm afraid i don't know what that is (although i've heard the term bandied around), nor how i'd install WizBar and PBreeze to it. How would i go about doing that? I might uninstall them to see if it makes the slightest bit of difference, anyway.

I'm kinda hoping it's not a memory problem at all, but just that i missed the 'play better please' setting in some menu somewhere. :wink:

UPDATE: okay, somehow (basically by uninstalling every blinking program on the blasted device, and then restarting!) i've got the program memory up to 36MB. And yet... this does not help. No discernible difference in quality of play on tcpmp. So... what else could this stuttery vid playback be caused by? It has to be something else. :(

[haesslich]

One question - what bitrate did you encode the video to, what codec are you using for sound and video, and how big is the resolution of the file you encoded? If it's trying to crush 640x480 to QVGA, it's giong to be pretty rough. Ditto if you're using h.264 encoding with a 300MHz-based CPU, or using FFMPEG with TCPMP. IF you've got a bitrate of about 900KBit/s, your CPU will choke rendering each frame, no matter what you've got on there, unless you've got graphics acceleration... which I don't recall the Acer having.

[isajoo]

well...most likely vids to high of a format... load up tcpmp and under file menu click in media info...if its bigger than 640x480...try a video with something like 588x238? not sure exactly. i hope u did not manually remove all apps on ur ppc. u could have done a backup, even from activesync and just hard reset. i would think that most ppcs could play videos smoothly...but maybe i was wrong. try downloading a video podcast like dl.tv or diggnation. they are usually smaller formats so u can try it out. download the xvid version, it plays super smooth on mine.

flash rom is the memory that came builtin my ppc, it is in addition to the OS rom and separate from the ram used for running apps. it is similar to a cf/sd card flash card.

[pheral]

Thanks tons haesslich and isajoo for your continued help. :D

The Acer screen is a VGA screen as far as i know, so i'm encoding to 640x480. I'd have thought this was right for it... should i be going smaller? Surely it would look pixelated when viewed full-screen? Oh, and the Acer is a 400Mhz CPU.
I'm encoding at 480kbps (PocketDVD won't let me go any lower than that) at 15fps.
PocketDVD doesn't specify what codec it uses to make wmv files... although there is an option for making avi files that gives me more choice over codecs, and allows me choose a Kbit rate. Maybe i'll have an experiment with avi's, and see if different codec avi's play better.

I'll also try a smaller resolution of video to see if that helps, as per both your suggestions. If it plays better and doesn't look too bad, that might be the answer.

Oh, and don't worry isajoo, the program uninstallation didn't take long and was kinda fun, so it's all good. :wink: Plus my backup software needs registration before i can use it again, so working that out would've taken longer in the end. :lol:

(Plus, i just discovered that Wisbar is *not* a happy bunny if it's installed on a memory card! Lesson learned there, lol)

[isajoo]

thats strange, wisbar works great off my flash drive. never tried cards before... but the internal rom work just as quickly as the ram for my apps. infact, i hardly have anything installed on main ram. maybe try to install wisbar from a cab file.

that ppc u have is quite powerful...should be running everything at lightning speeds. u dont have it set on power saving mode, right?

[Nurhisham Hussein]

The Acer screen is a VGA screen as far as i know, so i'm encoding to 640x480. I'd have thought this was right for it... should i be going smaller? Surely it would look pixelated when viewed full-screen? Oh, and the Acer is a 400Mhz CPU.


You don't actually gain much in terms of resolution by encoding in VGA versus QVGA, especially running through TCPMP - you won't get pixelation at all, just a very slight bluriness.

What is important though is to stick to the standard sizes. Encode in QVGA or VGA but NEVER in resolutions in between, even if they fit the screen - the PPC architecture does a pretty good job with the standard sizes, but in-between sizes forces the CPU to work overtime to render properly.


I'm encoding at 480kbps (PocketDVD won't let me go any lower than that) at 15fps.

That really sucks - if that's the best that PocketDVD can do, then I suggest looking at a different encoder. 15fps is terrible - for that matter, so is wmv. It takes too much CPU power for a given bitrate and fps, compared with Divx or Xvid.

I've used Fairuse Lite and PocketDivxEncoder - you might want to give those a try (you won't be able to use WMP with these though).

[pheral]

that ppc u have is quite powerful...should be running everything at lightning speeds.

Exactly what i thought! I wasn't anticipating problems, so this is strange. Shall definitely check the power-saving, just in case.
And yeah, not sure why Wisbar kicked up a fuss on my card, but it certainly didn't like it. It kept shutting down in the middle of usage, or freezing my ppc. Got it back on main memory now, so all is well. Might try it on the card again some day, to see if that really was the problem.

I've used Fairuse Lite and PocketDivxEncoder - you might want to give those a try (you won't be able to use WMP with these though).

Oh thanks, I'll definitely give those a try and see if i can get some better rates. And will take good note of the advice on sizes to encode at too. :D

I'll update this thread when i get time to try out these new ideas, cheers!