gearing up video capabilities

[dgarts]

Hey gang,

I've got The Core video app, very cool. I've got some SD cards (512 MB and 2GBs).

Now I need to understand either where to find movies that will work on my Treo650, or how I can convert .AVIs and DivX movies I have on my computer to a format that will fit on my SD card.

Is there a handy "how-to" or such thing that might walk me through...?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[TazUk]

The easy way is to get Kinoma Producer to convert them, although any converter using the same settings should work

http://www.kinoma.com/products.html?producer

[dgarts]

Thanks, mate! This helps.

[dgarts]

Originally Posted by TazUk

The easy way is to get Kinoma Producer to convert them, although any converter using the same settings should work

http://www.kinoma.com/products.html?producer

OK, let's break this down...

- I installed The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP)
- I got an app called Card Reader which very simply allows me to drag and drop files between my PC and my 2 GB SD Card in my Treo650, very cool.
- I dragged a 660MB .avi file of Office Space from my PC to my Treo650 SD card.
- I can watch the movie from start to finish, beautiful.

Questions.

- TCPMPplays AVI and .MPG files no problem, does not play .WMV files. Is there plug-ins that will enable WMV playback?

- Is there any way to compress a movie file so that it's not only smaller but still playable in a compressed format without having to expand it?

- Pocket DVD Wizard has been recommended, but I don't have a lot of DVDs that I'd like ripped to a file. I do have some movies files I'd like to convert to a smaller file format that will play on my Treo. Does Pocket DVD Wizard do that?

Thanks a bunch to all with tips. Sometimes I can't believe how much our Treos are capable of!

Duane

[skoenig]

Originally Posted by dgarts

OK, let's break this down...

Questions.

- TCPMPplays AVI and .MPG files no problem, does not play .WMV files. Is there plug-ins that will enable WMV playback?

- Is there any way to compress a movie file so that it's not only smaller but still playable in a compressed format without having to expand it?

- Pocket DVD Wizard has been recommended, but I don't have a lot of DVDs that I'd like ripped to a file. I do have some movies files I'd like to convert to a smaller file format that will play on my Treo. Does Pocket DVD Wizard do that?

Hopefully the below will help answer some of those..

1.
TCPMP does not currently support ALL wmv files but some will play. The differential is that new WMV made with WM9+ will definately not play. Those that do play will probably not have audio. The reason is that the original WMV formats for video compression were effectively different iteration of mpeg4 formats - MS hacked of course - and so some can be understood by the stock tcpmp_ffmpeg_plugin decoder.

The audio for wmv is another issues and a great many wmv that play will not have audio decoded properly. This is proabbly becuase they use ms_audiov1/2 and that codec is not an open standard (i might be wrong)...

2.
I use AutoGordian Knot (AutoGK) as it allows me to run my compression stuff very easily and batch up the process. If I'm all interested in compressing the video for my Treo I usually do two batchs... one for the PC at 512 wide and a seocnd one for the Treo at 320 wide - which add another hour or so to the compression time and I end up with two sets of avis. You can cut the data requirement almost by 3/4 by doing a smaller image size. There's good tutorials available from the main site and I've written a bit about it here.

3.
AutoGK (which is free) will accept avis and other video files as input for recompression or scaling... it's free and will probably do a very good job given that you're scaling down and not up... it can also strip the annoying boders top and bottom of a wide screen format movie that hasn't been properly cropped by the original ripper and save you more data space.

Hope this helps

~ Steph

[TazUk]

I use Kinoma Producer to convert/resize videos to a suitable form for the Treo, normally MPEG4 video and AAC audio I prefer to use TCPMP for playback rather than Kinoma's own player.