ryguy8954

I've just been trying out the pocket dvd studio demo and it seeems to me to be a reasonable alternative for ripping dvd's to a ppc and taking too long for the whole process.
I've used an old version of DVD to pocket pc but it took too long just to rip a movie to vga in crappy mpeg1 format. Then add another several hours on top of that for encoding to .wmv and you take up about 12 hours to convert a dvd to ppc and you get decent results but not the greatest results(old version of dvd to ppc). I decided to try other codecs for my wmv videos would not play smoothly at all on my X50v(just updated to A02 update but have not tried video on the tweaked gapi).Anyways, i downloaded pocket dvd studio and the xvid 1.0 final , and divx 5.2.1 codecs and installed them and installed the betaplayer on my ppc. After doing some test runs i have seen very nice results. To rip a whole movie(alien vs. predator, 1 hour , 42 minutes-extended scenes) to vga format and xvid codecs, it tooke me only about 3 hours to rip it to .avi(via xvid). The quality is amazing for only a bit rate of about 460 kpbs video, and 96 kpbs audio(mp3 encoder) for a final file size of about 418 MB and vga clarity! (The video gets "a little" blocky at times and a little funky but that's only when there's a bunch of movement like the camera moving and a lot of action taking place.) The video plays flawlessly on betaplayer without dithering but i see no differnce without it. When it's all said and done i have ripped a whole dvd to my ppc in vga format and have made it fit to my available remeaining memory on my SD card and it plays nicely compared to when i tried the wmv vga format.
Also the demo version let me rip the whole movie too which confused the crap out of me once it was going and it converted the whole movie on the demo version but it says it only records 5-11 minutes of video(huh).

Don't Panic!

I'm moving this to multimedia. I haven't tried Pocket DVD Studio but the program I do use defaults to xvid and I get the same results you do but having lots of memory available I encode to 700MB and the only blotchiness I see is with really dark lit scenes in Black and White movies. Try adjusting contrast and brightness in BetaPlayer to get rid of some of that.