fibrizo

Did the movie play on your PC?

musttang87

i dont have my axim yet(be here in about a week and a half) and i am trying this method to prepare movies for my axim. i followed everything in the guide, and when i am done i try and test it on my pc and it doesnt work..... is that suppose to happen??

fibrizo

It's supposed to work... Perhaps the second encoding pass is not done right.. if you don't do a second encoding pass, it won't play.

Make sure you save to avi twice to the same place and the same file name. you can do this manually if you want and skip the job screen.

I have put up a test file that I just encoded and it plays fine on my axim.

If you are having problems, please test your player out.

http://www.umich.edu/~sjwu/axim/

There is a 1.2meg test.avi file there...

It should play on your pc and on your axim in pocketmvp.

Cheryl

I just downloaded the test file. It plays on my PC and on my Axim :D.

Work4crown

I just wanted to say thanks for posting the links and detailed instructions for re-encoding.

Before you posted your instructions I had tried to capture a 10 minute Clifford cartoon at the lowest settings so it could be re-played on the Axim. My software produced a 60Mb file. That is just too big for only 10 minutes. The quality was really bad too.

Imagine my surprise to see your post the next day with detailed instructions and links to free software. I downloaded the files, installed them, and printed out your instructions.

I read in the untouched Clifford avi and re-encoded it using your method. It worked great. The file looks and sounds great and it only 13.1 Mb!

So at this point I was wondering about a few things.

First, I sometimes take long trips in my car with my two year old. I thought about getting one of those in dash tv/dvd combos until I saw they cost like $2000. Now I am thinking a dash mount bracket, Axim, cigarette lighter power cord, and memory card would be an acceptable alternative.

One thing that comes to mind is that I would need a bracket that could hold the Axim sideways. Is there such a thing?

Also, in your instructions you say to rotate the screen to the left 90 degrees which would make the power cable come out towards the driver of the car. So maybe I should rotate the movies in the other direction so my wife can deal with the Axim cord.

Finally, I use one of the cheapest solutions out there to suck video into my computer. It is a "Pinnacle Linx" cable. The Software it comes bundled with is Studio 7 SE and it is really limited. I would like to continue to use the hardware to suck in the video, but if there is a better program (freeware) out there that can do the work I'd like to know about it. Maybe virtualdub can be used? I have no idea.

I also re-encoded the original 24 minute black-and-white Zorro episode and that produced a 29.2Mb file.

Thanks again for your help getting started!




http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPa...21&Langue_ID=7

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Todd

fibrizo

You are welcome... Nothing beats the satisfaction of being able to help others with problems and seeing them happy with the results... (That's why I'm in medical school I think... otherwise it would suck too much...)

I used to rotate my films 90degrees to the right, because I liked that more, but the rotate functions in wmp and pocketmvp always rotate left... so I figured maybe it was a standard to rotate things left... But rotate any way you please and map your buttons in pocketmvp accordingly... (ie volume pause etc...)

I had thought about the axim as a movie player for my plane trips so I started reencoding like mad... (and I'm waiting for my 512mb CF card... with my current 256mb SD card I'm lookinf forward to about 10 hours of video... if only my battery could last that long... Ah the dream of a 3400ma extended battery with a 1 GB cf card... I could watch till my eyes fell out.)

You could try using virtualdub to capture from your cable if the drivers work right... here's some info..
http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_capture

Don't PDA mounts clamp on the sides of the PDA? Can you rotate these? I know there are suction based ones which you could just suction sideways...

I dunno, you are better off asking in the other forums about accessories...


Also if anyone else is having basic problems, you can email me. I don't mind answering a few questions and helping people with basic stuff. (basically I figure if I teach a few people, then they can be resources for other people...)

Chemcat

Thanks for your great guide, it my makes doing re-encodes to DiVX so easy! I haven't got my Axim X5 yet so I'm just practicing with all sorts of .avi and .mpg clips to see how they'll look. I was using DVD2AVI and VFAPI to frameserve my MPEG-2 clips from my SVCDs to VirtualDub but discovered VirtualDub MPEG-2v1.51 which has the ability to open MPEG-2 files directly. Makes it much less time consuming.
One question I do have. Laying filesize concerns aside, I'm curious as to what the highest video bitrate plays smoothly on the 400mhz Axim with 32kps-22khz-mono audio? Does OC'ing it to 500mhz give playing improvement or is the 100mhz bus the limiting factor?

fibrizo

I have overclocked my axim, I have a 300 and I run it at 400...

So far I seem to drop frames if the bitrate total goes over 300kb/sec including audio... But that could just be because my audio bitrate is too high...(I was using 128)

I know overclocking it to 500 would probably let you skip less frames at a higher bitrate. But I'm guessing even overclocked, the ceiling for no frame drop is somewhere like 300-350 total... Feel free to test it out and give the results. I'm pretty interested.

I'd do some tests myself, but my computer (measly 900mhz pentium 3) is already encoding like 10 hours a day... (it's annoying that I have an athlon xp 2100+ sitting here not setup yet because I'm too lazy to install windows and all the stuff....)

Cheryl

Well, I have good news and bad news after this last run. I can now play video on my Axim. It is upside down (oops...guess I should've skipped the rotation *hehe*). The bad news is that I still have no audio. I am off to try to figure out where I went wrong.
I swear, by the time I finish this one movie I will be an expert. :crooked:

fibrizo

Make sure that your pocketmvp player is not rotating the movie... uncheck the rotate icon in pocketmvp..

Cheryl

Rotate is not checked. If I choose it then my movie is playing correctly :). But since I have to go back and redo the encoding so I have audio I may as well rotate again so my Axim doesn't have to do the extra work.

geezer

Quote:

I have an athlon xp 2100+ sitting here not setup yet because I'm too lazy to install windows and all the stuff....)

Just finished my new box - Athlon 2000+, Asus mobo, 512DDR, 10gig for programs, 80gig for video, DVD, CDR-W, Canopus ADVC-100 firewire analog-digital converter. Now to finish loading software and "fire it (encoding) up, baby"! :D

Jeff

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Learn as you go - share what you know

Cheryl

I tried previewing the movie on WMP on my PC. It saw cannot allocate memory because no size has been set. What exactly does this mean? WMP help is absolutely no help :(.

fibrizo

Wow... That's some error... Did you do the second encoding pass yet? If you only do 1 pass, it won't play.

Also I'm wondering how your movie is being double rotated... Is it already rotated when you feed it to virtualdub?

Does the movie play on your axim?

Cheryl

I just tried it on my Axim...no go. It starts loading in Pocket MVP and then boots me out of MVP. Oy! It played yesterday with out sound and upside down. I went back into Virtual Dub and rotated and tried the sound again. Now I have nothing.