Iczelion

Hi..I've been on this site constantly for the past week since I received my Axim. I'm feeling pretty comfortable with it after a week. I'm now encoding videos. All is going good except that at the end of my test videos it says that I dropped around 1635 frames for a 28 min Family Guy Ep......yet it also says out of 26365 frames.........I played 26365 frames. Is this a flaw in MVP or is it something I can fix? I used the guide posted on the site to encode..with a couple changes.....FPS: 25.....Video Bitrate: 160..... and I ended up with a 33 meg files...It looks perfect..I'd like to see how a movie like LOTR will look with these settings. but i'd like to solve this mixup reporting dropped frames first. Oh I have the A03 rom and the 400mhz 255 processor.

red-i

what audio settings are you using? which codec? also, what video resolution did you encode at?

I do futurama and simpsons encodes at 218 kbit video bitrate, using 56k 22000khz audio and i get maybe 100 dropped frames in a 24min episode.

someone1

I encoded an episode (I forgot what show) once, and I encoded everything using the guide posted on this forum board and I came up with a 20 mb file, which played at 3.5 frames per second, and I had just about exactly half of all my frames dropped! (I have ax 400 MHz 255, A03 ROM, pocket MVP)

Talyn

I'm not exactly sure, but it sounded like you were asking: "how can it have played all 26365 frames and yet drop 1635? Wouldn't it have only played 24730 frames?" And the answer is: no. PocketMVP has to "play" each frame, but if it's running behind, it will drop (ie. not display) frames in order to try to catch back up to where it should be.

Settings I've been playing with: 230 Kbps with DivX seems to work really well so far, and gives a nice trade-off between high quality and file size. I may try the 218 that red-i is using when I get back home.

Encoding for portrait view, I leave the framerate alone - PocketMVP is able to keep up (I have some videos at 30 fps with 0 frames dropped) just fine. And converting to mono audio works great while still staying in sync (mono gives a much smaller file than stereo).

Encoding for landscape, this is where I have to decimate the framerate. Even at 400Mhz (I haven't tried any of the "overclocking" utilities yet) either the PocketPC and/or PocketMVP simply can't keep up yet. It can get 15 fps just fine though. And as red-i and I have been through, so far stereo MP3 (low bitrate seems to be fine at least) audio is needed to stay in sync.

A trick for Quicktime source videos: Decide ahead of time if you want to encode for portrait or landscape view, and when you export to .avi - set the framerate to either NTSC 23.97 fps or 30fps, whichever you want. I typically use NTSC for portrait. For landscape though, set it to 30 fps because you will be decimating the framerate in VirtualDub. It sounds like a small difference, only 2 to 3 fps, but the difference between 12.x and 15 fps is very noticeable. Also, if you have the hdd space, encode both audio and video uncompressed. It chews up a ton of hdd, but gives you total control and full quality in VirtualDub.

Iczelion

Red-I..I used Mpeg layer 3 32bit mono for the audio..screen size was 320x240 rotated...on Divx 5.04 Pro codec.I don't understand how some people say they leave their frame rate at 25fps or higher and have the video bitrate up over 200 yet they have no dropped frames, but I leave mine at 25fps and 160 bitrate and get so many dropped frames.

Talyn

Iczelion: I think DivX 5.04 had some issues, which is why 5.05 came out quickly thereafter. Also since you're using the Pro version, you did turn off all the Pro features for coding Pocket PC movies, right?

Iczelion

Thanks for the info Talyn... I installed divx 5.05 and will be trying it again with that codec. As far as the Pro features if you mean turning off the profiles? yes I did turn it off.....is there any other feature in Divx Pro that I should turn off?

Talyn

Pretty much everything should be turned off. The only options you need to be fooling with when encoding for Pocket PC are those on the Bitrate Control tab.