I'm pleased and relieved to announce version 2.0 of my WMV encoding guide. New to this version is:

• A table with alternate settings. Enables people to choose smaller filesizes or better quality.
• Instructions for dealing with anamorphic video sources.
• Additional processing options

WMV for PPC Encoding Guide

IMPORTANT NOTE: The purpose of this thread is to discuss this encoding guide and NOT a general discussion on the merits of WMV encoding vs. other methods. If you feel the need to advocate DivX or Mpeg encoding, please do that in another thread. Thank you.

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

Thanks sracer. The table of possible encodings is way cool!

OK, I have encountered an issue with VFAPI. When I try to add the d2v file like your guide says, I get a popup box that says:
"????? [path to file name] ?????" with only an OK button. Click on OK, and back to main VFAPI screen with Add Remove Quit buttons?

anyone can help me out?
nelj

Sracer,

On avg, how long does your process take? I've been using the Flask utility with the WM Encoder method and it takes 3.5 - 5.0 hours or so. Just wondering if your process is faster.

Thanks.

Also, what is the average output movie size? I wanna fit one on my 256mb SD card, but i dunno if it will fit or not.

Processing time greatly depends upon your system. This process takes me a little less than 2 hrs for a 90 minute film.

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

The chart on the guide helps compare the various settings with the expected file sizes.

Depending upon your perception of quality, you can get viewable
video that weighs in at only 40MB per hour. So a 2 hour movie weighs in at 80MB. I've managed to get 5 hours of video on a single 256MB CF card. Since I have 2 256 MB cards, I've decided to try a little higher quality. My new preferred settings weigh in at 55MB per hour and results in significantly better video.

Using this guide you will easily be able to fit a full movie on a 256MB SD card.

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

I'm sorry, i looked at it, but i took it as audio only, not full audio and video size, my bad. Hmm, at 55 megs/hour i can store 2 2hour movies on my 256mb card! Yippe!

Thanx again!

Hehe, yeah, it's easy to draw the conclusion that it is audio only at those sizes.

I highly recommend that you try encoding a movie trailer first to see if you'll like the quality. They're only 1-2 minutes in length, and take only 5 minutes to completely encode.

One knucklehead used "LOTR:Return of the King" as his test and then starting whining about how he wasted 10 hours encoding.

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

ok, heres my comments... I converted Starship Troopers last night. You may want to add for first tyme users, how to demux their audio as it is not a default setting. I had to go back and figure it out myself.

Demux the audio? In which application?

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

DVD2AVI, it doesnt automatically make a wav file, you have to set that the first tyme u run it.

yeah, sracer, you might want to make it a little more clear that you need to use Sefy's guide to DVD2AVI. The link is in there, it's just no so obvious.

I tried it out last night, finally got VFAPI to work, I think I didn't have the codecs installed correctly or something. But I'm pretty impressed! Decent quality and smaller size than what I've been getting with pocketdivxencoder! Thanks!

One question about Windows Encoder. Do you know how to crop widescreen? In PDXE it's pretty straightforward to set it to shrink the height to 240, then crop the sides of a widescreen to 320 to make a widescreen film fit the 4:3 format. You lose the sides of course, but I couldn't figure out how to scale the input to a post cropped height of 240?

nelj

ah, okay... thanks guys. It's been so long since the first time I used these tools, it's easy to forget some of those "first time" steps. I'll update my guide to include that information on DVD2AVI.

Tom Perconti (aka SpeedRacer - Lancelot of the Information Superhighway)
speedZone - soup up your Pocket PC!

Good job sracer! A better step by step conversion/encoding process and all freewares too!

Cheers!

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