I'm looking to get an X50V soon and I'm very interested in being able to watch movies on it.
What is the typical file size of a movie once you convert it? I guess it may depend on what format you choose but if you could tell me what it is for each (AVI, MPEG, WMV) that would be great.
How many movies would fit on a 512MB card? And what brand of SD cards are good but relatively inexpensive.
It would depend on how high you want the quaility to be for video and sound. I'm finding my movies running anywhere from <400MB to >650MB for longer movies. So I would agree with the monkey with glasses bigger is better ;)
1GB is the way to go, you'll find yourself regretting that you couldn't do as much with the 512MB card, that's the way I felt. When I first got my 1GB, I was like, what can I do to fill all this space? It's a lot of space, but you can do MUCH to fill the space, 1GB is good. 1GB CF cards are $41.99 at the lowest price, not bad at all.
I would say definately go for a 1GB card. Alot of my divx's were made to fit a CD, and I don't have the time or will to shrink them further. Since they are 700 MB having a 1GB is the sure way to avoid problems.
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I tend to use 4 MB for every minute of playing time. So I tend to only fit only two movies on a 1 GB card but you can fit more if you shrink the files even further.
I usually convert DVD movies to Divx format around 475-490MB, so it can fit in the 512M SD card and also preserve the quality to be watched on my laptop.
I bought Sandisk, Vikings, Lexar, and Kingston brand cards, all of them work fine. But my higher capacity cards (4GB CF, 2GB SD, 1GB SD) are from Sandisk, they are very good cards.
"You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too much free storage!"
- Paraphrased from a quote by Carter Burden
If you're anything like me you will end up using a considerable amount of space on your cards for programs as well as media. I would strongly suggest getting a card reader at the same time (assuming you don't have one already) as large transfers are painfully slow over USB/WiFi.
Since I couldn't afford the 1GB cards when I bought mine, I only got a 256MB SD card and 'inherited' the 128 MB card from my digital camera that took a dive on me recently.
I don't have an X50v, but I do have an X50-mid. I just did a rip of Spaceballs @ 200MB that doesn't look too bad. However, it's set so that it's only 320 pixels wide, which is smaller than you'll be using on yours, if you go 640x480.
One thing I have learned in ripping a lot of my DVD collection to CD (kids and disney movies should never be allowed in the same room), is that TV resolution isn't much higher than 320x240 (it's something like 352x288 for Video CD's). So, you can get away with killing 2 birds using one stone. Make your rips at 352x288 and you can burn off a backup DVD (you have to make it a MPG file, though), as well as compress that MPEG to DivX or Xvid, or whatever, and put it on the Ax.
If you decide to do that, that's not a bad idea. In fact, the file size is usually twice as big when you do 640x480 resolution. I've done two files, same episode and re-encoded them both (one in 320x240, the other 640x480) and the put them both at the highest quality possible and the 640x480 came out two times bigger.
Put them on my x50v, honestly, it's like comparing TV and Satellite, or VHS and DVD, the 320x240, while not bad, is grainy, and the 640x480 is clear, crisp and looks amazing. You make the decision. I personally prefer quality over quantity.