Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

Hi,

The forthcoming successor to the Treo 600:
http://www.brighthand.com/article/ [...] 50_Details
with its 320x320 screen, combined with the cheap SD memory prices (1GB
<~ $120), makes me think about watching compressed video on a Palm.

Can any high-res Palm owners share their experiences using Kinoma
Producer/Player and/or Pocket DVD?
http://www.kinoma.com/faqplayer.html
http://www.pqdvd.com/

In particular, how many minutes of 320x320 video can I expect to fit
onto a 1GB card, where the video doesn't have too many video or audio
artifacts? Somewhere I saw a recommendation of 10fps rather than the
traditional 30fps. Is this very distracting?

TIA,

Jonathan

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

Gee, finally a nice hi res for the Treo...

If you give me 480 x 320 + bluetooth + wifi...then I likely will switch to
that phone!!

The about the best player for the palm (quality + compression) is
www.mmplayer.com

The above uses the popular mpeg4 (or so called divX codec). This means you
can get very good quality at low data rates.

For example, a 113 minute move (Thomas crow affair) you get the following
numbers for a T3

416 x 312, 12 FPS, Mono sound

Interesting, the reason for 12 frames per second is "1/2" that of 24 frames
(you have to go 1/2 the original content if you want to preserve audio
sync).
And, while 10 seems slow, 12 is not bad at all. 15 frames person second is
plenty

The data rate per minute with the above (very good screen
quality...virtually NO pixlalxon noticeable) is 1.765 megs per minute. So,
the resulting movie of 113 minutes (I cut out the credits etc.) is 199 megs.
That means that the move fits *easily* on the very affordable 256 meg sd
cars (what less then $50 these days?). In fact, I have room left for all
kinds of stuff (50 megs left over!!).

Another TV show (some CNN news specials where I cut out the commercials):
74 mins, 416 x 272, 15 FPS, 1.91 megs per min = 141 megs.

Again, you can see how easily a 1 or 2 hours of video can fit on a 256 card.

So, along with mmplayer, you will need some tools that let you create
content for you player. The pocket DVD is a good way to go if you don't know
much about this stuff. You can also use Kimona player. It is a lot easer to
use because it comes with a content converter. However, the resulting video
is made JUST for kimona. And the data rates for the same quality as divX
about 4.5 megs per minutes. That means that a 120 minutes move will take 528
megs as opposed to 234 megs with divx (and, the divx is BETTER quality by a
good margin at this data rate!).

Note that the main bottle neck on the pda is NOT the processing, but the
"amount" of data that can be written to the screen. So, on a palm T3, you
can't play back 480 x 320 screens, since the pipe to the "screen" is too
small. However, you can certainly get 416 x 312 (and that looks like full
screen anyway). If you drop down the y-axis, then you can increase the x.
So, you can get about 110-130,000 pixels. Hence, star wars in HD format is
going to be 480 x 224...and that works just fine for example. (so, you have
to keep the X x Y to <= 130,000......so 416 x 312 is <= 130,000).

Also, 15 fps is really nice. You can push the frame rates up to 24 in some
cases..but you don't gain much (and, as you push up the frame rate, then you
have to drop the total number of pixels written to the screen again).
Further, you can't just switch the frame rate when you create content
without causing audio to video sync problems. So, converting the standard
29.99 frames per second to 15 works well, and 24 frame stuff to 12 works
well.

An episode of the Simpson's is thus 40 megs. I often have two or 3 episodes
that I record during the week on my palm (3 shows is only 120 megs!).

You can read up more about peoples experiances here at the www.mmplayer.com
site.

But, to answer you question...yes, the quality of the video is very good.
--
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
pleaseNOOSpamKallal@msn.com
http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

jaepstein_63@yahoo.com (Jonathan Epstein) writes:
> Can any high-res Palm owners share their experiences using Kinoma
> Producer/Player and/or Pocket DVD?
> http://www.kinoma.com/faqplayer.html
> http://www.pqdvd.com/
>
> In particular, how many minutes of 320x320 video can I expect to fit
> onto a 1GB card, where the video doesn't have too many video or audio
> artifacts? Somewhere I saw a recommendation of 10fps rather than the
> traditional 30fps. Is this very distracting?

Due to some of the weird things I do at work, I've moved a lot of
videos to my T3 using Kinoma. Here's my experiences making movies
with Kinoma:

1. The paid version of Kinoma is *way* better in quality than the free
version that came with the T3.

2. 10 fps seems to give the best results on my T3, and for my stuff it
hasn't been too distracting.

3. Kinoma's compression isn't all that spectacular. For 480x320 12
fps video with compression as high as I can crank it without it
looking like garbage (640 kbps), it's between 2 and 5 MB a minute.
Above 12 bps my T3 starts dropping frames.

4. If your video isn't in a standard video format supported by
Quicktime, it can take a lot of converting (whereas PocketDVD, IIRC,
will encode straight from DVD).

--
Richard W Kaszeta
rich@kaszeta.org
http://www.kaszeta.org/rich

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

Thanks for your informative responses. The following 'guide' was also
posted at about the same time, and is informative as well:

http://groups.google.com/groups?dq [...] 012.net.il

Thanks again,

Jonathan