G1 video encoding: How To

Man Ive had my G1 for a week or so with the video player and now that its not available on the market its decided to stop working on me.  I tried everything besides uninstalling because I wont be able to get it back.  Oh well no videos for me.  How sad and I just encoded Lord of the Ring that was over 2 gb

Okay actually my computer had an error during the transfer and once I deleted the last video file I tried to transfer everything works again.  Whew close one

Man Ive had my G1 for a week or so with the video player and now that its not available on the market its decided to stop working on me.  I tried everything besides uninstalling because I wont be able to get it back.  Oh well no videos for me.  How sad and I just encoded Lord of the Ring that was over 2 gb

Okay actually my computer had an error during the transfer and once I deleted the last video file I tried to transfer everything works again.  Whew close one

At least you have it   I did the video tests for the board two weeks ago and I can not get it

Yeah that was a close one though. The video player would be the first thing I would want back on the market.

Yeah that was a close one though. The video player would be the first thing I would want back on the market.

Yeah I am glad I didn't uninstall the video app but I do hope that it does return to the market sometime soon. All I can say is keep checking because they seem to update often. Good luck!

Nobody here seems to be a mac user, but in case another one besides myself wanders in here... I found THE app to use for video encoding on the mac...

ffmpegX
http://ffmpegx.com/index.html

It seems to be extremely flexible and lets you specify all the specs you want for encoding.

Good day !

video player back up

I encoded video and the output was .mp4.   I loaded them onto a folder named Video on the SD card and launched the app.  It says "No Videos"  something I'm missing?

I encoded video and the output was .mp4.   I loaded them onto a folder named Video on the SD card and launched the app.  It says "No Videos"  something I'm missing?

Try add an "s" to video the folder name is "videos" Just did it works great.

BTW: I used DVDFab to convert DVD files from my media center
bitrate 640
fps 29.97
audio bitrate 128
file size is big 646MB

I encoded video and the output was .mp4.   I loaded them onto a folder named Video on the SD card and launched the app.  It says "No Videos"  something I'm missing?

Try add an "s" to video the folder name is "videos" Just did it works great.

BTW: I used DVDFab to convert DVD files from my media center
bitrate 640
fps 29.97
audio bitrate 128
file size is big 646MB

 I tired some of my BOTI episodes...

 Settings -

 Bitrate 720
 fps 29.97
 audio bitrate 64
 file size 130mb (already reduced from a Divx file)

 I get very slight frame skip, bitrate too high?

 I think that hardware acceleration isn't supported yet, that might be the cause...

I installed the 1.0 video player.  It is only 15K, so I see why it is basic.... it is only 15K in size!  Obviously there is no optimization yet, so I look forward to this app and others with more codec focus and optimization.  This player has no options other than what file you want and basic play options.  No aspect ratio fitting, no sound options- it just plays it as it sees it.  But then again, it is only 15K in size!

Using Super C, I can not figure out how to get videos to decode with the correct aspect ratio.  Either it is poorly documented or the ability is not there.  Also, the decoding looks fine with still or slow moving scenes, but poor when there is a lot of movement- even in HQ mode.

Pocket Divx gets rid of all blockies, even at 200 kbs, and the decoder has the option to leave the aspect set as the source file.  Pocket Divx allows the option of double pass- the second pass is how blockies are cleaned up.

Problem is Pocket Divx is of course for avi file output (divx or xvid) and not MP4.

Nobody here seems to be a mac user, but in case another one besides myself wanders in here... I found THE app to use for video encoding on the mac...

ffmpegX
http://ffmpegx.com/index.html

It seems to be extremely flexible and lets you specify all the specs you want for encoding.

Good day !

I'm also a mac user but i like to use mpeg streamclip to make my videos G1 compatible, so far i got some family guy and my favorite music video "put that cookie down"
heres the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyZ6WTDxv8s

After playing around a bit, I used basically the exact same settings as the main post, 15fps and all the same audio settings, however, i switched the output to H.264/AVC. This produced a perfectly playable file with very little noticable blocking, and the same file size as with the MPEG-4 option selected. It looks much, much better with H.264 than with the MPEG-4, and the video player didn't seem to have any trouble playing it back.

Edit: After testing, the chin stays cooler when playing back H.264 encoded files than when it's playing back MPEG-4. Most likely less power used too!

After playing around a bit, I used basically the exact same settings as the main post, 15fps and all the same audio settings, however, i switched the output to H.264/AVC. This produced a perfectly playable file with very little noticable blocking, and the same file size as with the MPEG-4 option selected. It looks much, much better with H.264 than with the MPEG-4, and the video player didn't seem to have any trouble playing it back.

Edit: After testing, the chin stays cooler when playing back H.264 encoded files than when it's playing back MPEG-4. Most likely less power used too!

H.264 is about 30% more efficient, so that would make sense that it stays cooler as well as blockies going away.  H.264 did not appear to work in the previous version, so this is very good news!  Have you figured out how to make all videos play back with the correct aspect ratio? 

This also means a lot more MP4's will work, since most people encode with H.264 because of the perfomance improvements!

I've been transcoding some TV shows that i have, I just let it auto-select the aspect ratio, it seems to choose 3:2, which works good on the device, doesn't appear to stretch or anything. I haven't tried any widescreen clips yet, I'm at work right now and I don't have any with me to try. I'll give them a shot when I'm back home.

On the H.264 thing, there was mention that the device has hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding, so perhaps running cooler is a side-effect of it being able to take care of a lot of the decoding work in hardware rather than software codecs.

I've been transcoding some TV shows that i have, I just let it auto-select the aspect ratio, it seems to choose 3:2, which works good on the device, doesn't appear to stretch or anything. I haven't tried any widescreen clips yet, I'm at work right now and I don't have any with me to try. I'll give them a shot when I'm back home.

On the H.264 thing, there was mention that the device has hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding, so perhaps running cooler is a side-effect of it being able to take care of a lot of the decoding work in hardware rather than software codecs.

How do you select "auto select" for the aspect ratio?  I see no option for that.

Thanks!

DVD ripping for COMPLETE NEWBIES.

If you are completely clueless about how to rip a DVD to your G1 (like I was a week ago) this post is for you.
This method will rip a movie straight from your DVD to an MP4 file that the G1 Video Player 1.0 knows how to play.

You will need to download and run HandBrake (an open source ripper)  http://handbrake.fr/  HandBrake has the simplest, most intuitive UI of any ripper I have found so far.

Here are some settings that work for the G1.  Some experimentation may find a better set of parameters, but these work and yield good results.  A two hour movie ends up about 375 MB.

Source: Browse to the VIDEO_TS folder on your DVD
Title: Select the longest one.
Destination: Wherever you want to keep the file.  You can actually rip directly to the mounted SD card of the G1, if you want.
Preset:  Classic works.  Others may also, I haven't tested them yet.
OutPut Settings:  Set Encoder to Mpeg4, Audio to AAC, uncheck the two other checkboxes.

On the Picture Settings tab, turn off Crop, check "Loose Anamorphic", and set width to 480.  (NOTE: sometimes you have to check Anamorphic PAR before Loose Anamorphic becomes usable.  Maybe this is a GUI bug?)

On the Video tab, set the Quality Avg Bitrate to 384.

Click Start in the upper left corner.  A 2 hour movie takes about 45 min to encode.

Hopefully people will find this helpful.

Noel.

EDIT:  If the DVD you want to rip is copy protected, you will need to also install DVD43 ( http://www.dvd43.com ), a system tray application that de-copy-protects DVDs on the fly. There aren't any configuration parameters, you just install it and forget it.  It silently removes copy protection as you read data from the DVD.

oh, and this may come usefull too incase your lacking content!

http://www.downloadtoolz.com/xvideos/update.html

Very nice! I guess the new version Video Player supports other codecs which will now make it so we can tweak out the video even further. I will update the original post to reflect this. Thanks for the input!!!

Good stuff kind sir

I just used my CloneDVD Mobile to make a movie for my G1. It works great very little chop with Apocalypto.
I just set it for iphone  and checked deinterlace video made mine half a gig in size. Quality is good at that level.