How small can a movie be? wich size of memory card is recommended?

gardin · 07-21-03, 03:58 PM

Hello!

I think about to buy a compact flash card 512 mb or 256mb i will use it sometimes for music and sometimes for movies. For example if i will se a movie that is about 2 hours, how small can i get it? And is 256mb CF enought? The movie should be in stereo because i will get some headphones.

Someone knows how small the movie can be?

/Johan

hambalan · 07-21-03, 04:15 PM

see my previous thread for starter

http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showt...&threadid=9076

07-21-03, 04:19 PM

a two-hour movie can be easily shrunk down to about 120MB with good quality. i can fit two full-length movies onto each of my 256MB SD cards.

stereo will cost you space. i always put my movies into mono.....a 2hr stereo movie might be around 150-160MB, not sure, but you're doubling the amaount of audio data when you use stereo.

07-21-03, 04:32 PM

A 2 hour movie into 120mb??? Your definition of "good quality" must be a lot looser than mine! :p

That being said, how big/small a given video is depends on the quality you want, both video and audio, and what viewpoint (portrait or fullscreen landscape) you encode in.

There are bitrate calculators out there that can give you a bitrate to encode in if you have to fit the video into N megs of storage space, but none of the ones I've tried take mono and lower audio bitrates into consideration, so they're not entirely accurate.

When it's all said and done, if you can afford the bigger storage card, just get it - you'll fill it quickly anyway! :)

KillerofKiller · 07-21-03, 04:40 PM

how can you shrink down a movie. and can you get movies off of DVD's that you buy

wheaton · 07-21-03, 04:43 PM

follow this guide

Should have no problem if you follow the guide to the letter.

ohh and be sure you download Divx at www.divx.com

You will also need the divx player for pocket pc here.

the below post is right but the information contained in the post is allready all over the board in links.. look under the pinned topics on the multimedia area of the board here .

cartvader1 · 07-21-03, 04:45 PM

Check out this thread in the Multimedia forum to see how to shrink movies down.

http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showt...&threadid=3692

If you are wanting to rip them off of a DVD you will need to find more software. I'm not 100% sure of the legality of it so I will refrain from saying what and where.

CV1

RedruM7 · 07-21-03, 05:21 PM

I dont know about u guys but since I only have a 128 CF card, I've been compressing my video files to about 5-8 mbs, most of them are full half hour cartoons, TV episodes, or music videos which I can compress to around 1-2 mbs. Of course the quality isent the greatest, but I find that its just right for a PDA screen.

I've wanted to try compressing a full length movie to see how small I could get it, but havent got to that yet. I'm guessing I would get it to around 20-30 mbs. For me I find the memory size is more important than anything else, since I have mostly games, and mp3's filling up 75% of my memory.

ceej13 · 07-21-03, 05:26 PM

I have a PNY 128MB SD card. I find that if I really like a movie a lot I take advantage of the full capacity of my card to get decent quality picture and sound without having any dropped frames while playing at full screen. Otherwise I can try and fit 2 hour and a half movies in this card.

07-21-03, 06:04 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Talyn
A 2 hour movie into 120mb??? Your definition of "good quality" must be a lot looser than mine! :p

uh probably not. are you using virtualdub? don't forget to resize the video and decimate the frames.

the 120MB movies i speak of are all VHS quality. they're also .avi files, if that makes any difference.

RCC · 07-23-03, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Astounded EEG
uh probably not. are you using virtualdub? don't forget to resize the video and decimate the frames.

the 120MB movies i speak of are all VHS quality. they're also .avi files, if that makes any difference.

I'm with Talyn. I use Vdub, resize and decimate frames. I set my bitstream at 224kbps and I had to tweak some stuff to get that where I considered it decent. My movies come out much bigger than yours even for short films. The ones I have done so far all had stereo encoding originally which I kept but I don't think it completely explains the difference(50-70 megs).

07-23-03, 06:59 PM

I did manage to get Antz down to 123mb but I chopped off all the credits and encoded at 180kbps, which is lower than I normally use. I'm typically 224, 230 or 288.

I'm just pickier about the quality of the video, which is what my comment meant on the post above. I have a 512mb card, so I can afford to encode at a higher bitrate.

Wired Pig · 07-23-03, 07:15 PM

I guess its just me.

When I encode I use a bit rate of 96. The video is good with only minor artifacting. I also set the audo to the least I can hear comfortibly - about 11025hz and 8bit mono. I was able to get the Matrix in at 108mb. Very viewible and fir well on my 128mb CF Card.

07-23-03, 07:28 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Astounded EEG
are you using virtualdub? don't forget to resize the video and decimate the frames.

Of course I'm using VirtualDub, with the SmartResize filter (it's a 3rd party filter).

As for decimating... why? It's not a requirement, depending on the source video framerate and whether I choose to encode for portrait or fullscreen landscape. And it only reduces the filesize by a few megs, not by half as some people think.

My 400MHz will run 30fps in portrait at higher bitrates with no problems at all. Fullscreen landscape can handle 24-25fps. That being the case, I only decimate if I feel I wouldn't mind the lower framerate in that particular video. For a DVD though, I will encode back to NTSC 23.98fps or whatever it is and play it full speed. (There are a couple methods of doing this that I use.)

Keep in mind, this all started with one old guide, with the old DivX v4.x and old Pocket PCs. The newer guides just repeat the same stuff, the one on this site is no exception. The newer Pocket PC's have more processing power and are able to run video much better than the old ones that were in use when the original guides were published. Memory card prices have also dropped in recent years, so people are getting bigger and bigger ones, and can afford to have larger files with better quality.

In a nutshell, if you have a more modern/powerful PPC (the Axim certainly qualifies) you also have more VirtualDub options open to you than the old PPCs did, so you can go above and beyond what the older guides talk about.

07-23-03, 07:45 PM

all i do is follow that pocketmatrix guide, been doing it for ages and my average movie size is like 119MB.

video quality is terrific, and sound is pretty good too. (I use mono)

[shrugs]