Seeing some of the threads/questions re: Handbrake settings for the Nook, if you're having issues or just want something completely automated I found that DVD Catalyst ($10) has three presets for Nook Color (normal, fast, high quality) that work very well -- essentially just load the file or folder, select the preset and hit go. You can enable "advanced" user if you want to tweak the options but I've tested it with a couple of dvd video_ts folders and videos of different codecs (both audio and video) and they've all come out in good quality, and all playable without software decoding.
The file sizes that come out are comparable to the ones produced by presets for Handbrake people have produced here. a 1 hr 55 min video encoded for me at 1.39GB at the highest quality Nook setting.
I know it's not free like Handbrake but it might save someone headaches especially if they're wrestling with, for example, widescreen anamorphic content that isn't 16:9 or 4:3. Or if they just don't want to deal with tweaking presets
Does batch jobs as well, and has presets for a slew of other android devices if you're also converting for other formats/resolutions for your phone, etc.
is it faster then handbrake when converting the video?
Somewhat; I tested it last night for you with a 5-minute video. It took Handbrake 3 mins and 45 seconds to encode, it took DVD Catalyst 3 mins 15 seconds -- I can't (or haven't found) the command line interface to see what DVD Catalyst is writing out for its encode jobs, but I've tried to match w/e specs as closely as possible for the test (audio/video bitrate, etc.) How that will scale to larger files, I'm not entirely sure -- I batch encode all my videos before I go to bed at night.
I'd like to use AMD Video Converter as it uses the GPU to convert and is about twice as fast as Handbrake even on my Quad Core but I'm having trouble finding a way to manually control the settings for the output to match the NC needs. Anybody have any tips there?
Edit- Trying out MediaEspresso - Media Converter. So far, problems with output, will keep trying and report back. MediaEspresso settings not working with NC. It is a pretty nice encoder that has support for GPU encoding and is faster by about 50% than Handbrake, but not flexible enough to get the output that the NC needs. Working great to encode for my EVO however.
Just wanted to point out that with the speed of the NC (OC) and the range of codecs recognized by various players you hardly need to recode videos anymore.
britoso said:
Just wanted to point out that with the speed of the NC (OC) and the range of codecs recognized by various players you hardly need to recode videos anymore.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you gotten 720p videos to work smoothly with software decoding? I am only oc'ed to 1.1 Ghz and they still stutter. That's what I'm normally encoding.
*** Edit:*** Just to clarify, I mean encoding from 720p -> 480p so I can use Nook's hardware acceleration.
Both nookie froyo and the newer cm7 builds have hardware decoding
I didn't think the Nook's DSP (TI OMAP 3621) allowed native 720p decoding, only the OMAP 3630+ -- there was a thread here somewhere that said something about that. The 854x480 maximum resolution was, I thought, a hardware, not software limitation for the Nook.
From my own (meager) experience, anything higher than 480p insists on being played via software decoding regardless of what player I've used.
Some sites say 720p, others mention what you said... I just leave hd content for my bigger,hd screen
britoso said:
Just wanted to point out that with the speed of the NC (OC) and the range of codecs recognized by various players you hardly need to recode videos anymore.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have moboplayer and CM7 OC to 1.3 and 720p video is still sub par via software decoding. Best results are still to handbrake recode to mp4 at 854x840.
The hardware decoding only handle mp4 files.
I tried this software to re-encode hd file to lower res mp4 and it does it lot faster than handbrake (on old P4 w/o gpu decoding GPU) : format factory : http://format-factory.softonic.fr/
* Update *
Youtube Video Samples below for comparison - some compression artifacts showing there, not from the sony tablet playback (it was flawless on either mode), most likely youtube recompression tools
Hi,
I bought one of these tablets just yesterday - 16GB version - and so far I'm extremely pleased with it! Typing is a breeze, image quality is superb, gaming is pretty decent even for 3D, I bought Riptide GP after upgrading Honeycomb to 3.2, but I'm having issues with HD mkv playback.
Basically, watching 720p or 480p even (anime mkv files) I get jerky video playback when the movie player is set to HW mode. The jerks are subtle and steady, but mostly noticeable especially on panning scenes. If I change the player settings to SW or Fast SW, playback is smooth but slightly less quality there (but totally fine though). I've tried several players other than the built-in video player and results are the same.
HD flash plays OK, so I don't think this is a hardware performance issue, probably some HW / codec compatibility issue....
Can anyone else confirm this? Horriblesubs releases (Naruto Shippuuden / Fairy Tail).
SD xvid releases play just fine, both HW and SW settings on the player.
Better .h264 codec support perhaps?
(apparently, not .h264!)
Oh, and quite pleased with the fact that video files can in fact be played directly from the SD card, without having to copy them to the internal memory storage!
I tried posting from the XDA free app in the Market, but somehow, it crashes everytime I try to post from it, so I'm using the android browser - already submitted a report.
Video Info:
Codec 4CC: AVC1
Image Size: 1280x720
Frame Rate: 23.976 fps
Global Motion Compensation: No
packet Bitstream: No
Quarter Pixel: No
Audio:
Codec: AAC
Channels: Stereo
Bitrate: 16000 Bps / 128 Kbps
Variable Bitrate: No
Frequency: 44100 Hz
SW Mode (Fast): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiAj80cC0s8
HW Mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXWH3RE-R4
wickwire said:
Hi,
I bought one of these tablets just yesterday - 16GB version - and so far I'm extremely pleased with it! Typing is a breeze, image quality is superb, gaming is pretty decent even for 3D, I bought Riptide GP after upgrading Honeycomb to 3.2, but I'm having issues with HD mkv playback.
Basically, watching 720p or 480p even (anime mkv files) I get jerky video playback when the movie player is set to HW mode. The jerks are subtle and steady, but mostly noticeable especially on panning scenes. If I change the player settings to SW or Fast SW, playback is smooth but slightly less quality there (but totally fine though). I've tried several players other than the built-in video player and results are the same.
HD flash plays OK, so I don't think this is a hardware performance issue, probably some HW / codec compatibility issue....
Can anyone else confirm this? Horriblesubs releases (Naruto Shippuuden / Fairy Tail).
SD xvid releases play just fine, both HW and SW settings on the player.
Better .h264 codec support perhaps?
Oh, and quite pleased with the fact that video files can in fact be played directly from the SD card, without having to copy them to the internal memory storage!
I tried posting from the XDA free app in the Market, but somehow, it crashes everytime I try to post from it, so I'm using the android browser - already submitted a report.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am having the same problem you described? Is this typical on all android tablets?
Looks like i'll need to convert unfortunately... I wonder if there is an app for that.
Unless it is a codec issue and there is an alternative codec or fix..
I'm curious, do you feel the quality between HW mode and either SW mode available to be that worse? I'm using SW for now on these particular files, I was thinking about converting the files original formats but SW still seems pretty good I think! I will try to snapshot the differences and post them here!
Hadn't noticed before, the tablet comes with 3 HD sample videos inside all play just fine, no jerks - seems more and more like a specific codec compatibility issue with tegra possibly, to me...
A software issue. I can play videos fine on my Jetstream and Ipad2 which play badly on the tablet S.
So it isn't an android issue.
For MKV playback try DicePlayer and install the Diceplayer plugin for tegra.
Try the trial version to see it meets your requirements (before buying).
----- snip -----
Diceplayer uses HW video decoder.
It use HW video decoder at various containers and audio codecs combination. ( H.264/AC-3/MKV, H.264/DTS/MKV , H.264/AAC/MOV )
-------------------
yhzhrm said:
For MKV playback try DicePlayer and install the Diceplayer plugin for tegra.
Try the trail version to see it meets your requirements (before buying).
----- snip -----
Diceplayer uses HW video decoder.
It use HW video decoder at various containers and audio codecs combination. ( H.264/AC-3/MKV, H.264/DTS/MKV , H.264/AAC/MOV )
-------------------
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tried it, perfect playback with the plugin - bought it already, many thanks!
yeah DicePlayer indeed the best HW accelerated player in the market... support MKV, AC3 audio codec, subs... wooot
exkaizen said:
yeah DicePlayer indeed the best HW accelerated player in the market... support MKV, AC3 audio codec, subs... wooot
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 I tried out MX player too but found that DicePlayer had smoother playback.
Working container / video / audio combo and easy conversion
I've tested several combinations of container / video / audio formats with several players. First of all, I didn't notice any significant differences in playback quality between the players I tried, but I might not have tried Dice player for all of the combos.
I did try MX Video Player, mVideoPlayer, MoboPlayer and BS Player Lite, with a 720p h264 encoded video track at about 3000 kbps. For all players, I found the SW decoding modes to insufferably slow and jerky - I assume a lower bitrate in the video track might fix that. Per hardware acceleration, the video always played fine (when it played at all, see format details below).
These combos did NOT work:
mkv/mp4 container, h264 encoded video, mp3 audio
mkv container, h264 encoded video, ac3 audio (plays the video hw accelerated, but doesn't play the sound at all)
mkv container, h264 encoded video, aac audio
The only combo that did work flawlessly was this:
mp4 container, h264 encoded video, aac audio
I now had the problem that my standard video encoding tool, handbrake, cannot transcode files without also recoding the video file - and why would I want to recode the video when usually it's a h264 encoded video that will play with the right container & audio? The easiest way to transcode such a file is to use ffmpeg - I did this under linux, but it should work the same for Windows:
Code:
ffmpeg -i INPUTFILE.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac -ab 160k -ar 48000 -async 48000 OUTPUTFILE.mp4
I couldn't figure out a way to easily transcode mkv files where the video track has a variable bitrate (VFR) - I had to recode those with handbrake. If anyone has a simpler method that doesn't involve avisynth / is available for linux, I'd be happy to hear it.
DicePlayer rocks. I tried various apps but only did DicePlayer works. Tested with a 1080 h.264 movie and the quality was STUNNING! Definitely worth the money
By the way, Honey does not support H.264 natively so most of the players out there won't work
zenithz said:
DicePlayer rocks. I tried various apps but only did DicePlayer works. Tested with a 1080 h.264 movie and the quality was STUNNING! Definitely worth the money
By the way, Honey does not support H.264 natively so most of the players out there won't work
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the heads up and for the good news! Downloading now!
I used the latest VEGAn-ge-7.1.0 for the 1.2 bootloader on my gTab with CWM the other day. First time ever flashing a rom and everything went great! The problem I'm having is that the built-in video player in VEGAn will no longer play my mpeg4 movies/TV shows. With the stock ROM on the gTab I never had any problems with the built-in videoplayer OR mVideoplayer. They both worked just fine. Once I flashed VEGAn my movies wont work.
I can only assume it has something to do with hardware acceleration.?.?.?.? I have over 5tb worth of movies and tv shows already ripped from my collection, I will NOT re-encode anything at this point!
99% of what I use my gTablet for is watching movies while I'm at work(I'm on call with lots of down time) I would love to use a better ROM then the crappy TnT stuff Viewsonic shipped this thing with. But I cant NOT be able to play my mpeg4 movie files.
Is there a good ROM that will let my mpeg4's work like the stock ROM does? I dont care about any fancy features or anything in the ROM, I only watch movies on this thing and play the occasional game. But if I had a better ROM I'm sure I'd use this thing for more then what I do now.
My mpeg4 encode settings used in DVDFab are as follows:
848x480 resolution
3000kbps fixed bitrate(less then this movies can get pixelated)
128bit DolbyPrologic2 audio
FastEncoding 1 pass
These are the best settings for mpeg4's that I have found while testing out various settings when I bought the gTab. From the looks of the settings could it be that I need HW accel video playback instead of SW?
Any of the Froyo based roms such as Beastly-Clemsyn (my favorite, very fast and stable), Frankentab, BC, etc all have working hardware acceleration, as does the new ICS beta. You are probably right about the hardware accel. being the problem, this is the same reason I always end up back on a Froyo rom. I have encoded a lot of video that I stream from my main PC, and there is almost always skips, freezes or audio sync problems on roms w/o hardware acceleration.
You can also try on your current rom, MXPlayer and Mobo Player have versions that are optimized for ARM v7 (Gtablet). In the players settings, change from hardware to software video and audio decoding. Most of my videos play alright with MXPlayer on software decoding using CM7, which doesn't have hardware acceleration.
Last, you could try Qloud Media, if you have a pretty fast PC. Qloud will re-encode and stream your video from the PC, optimized for the target device. It works very well on every device I have tried it on, and can even work beyond your network, but it consumes my entire 4 CPU cores in bursts of a few seconds while it is re-encoding, so no intense PC usage while it is running.
Thank you! I'll try and stick with the Froyo based ROM's. I've DL'd quite a few different ROM's but I have yet to install any of them other then the latest VEGAn one.
Hi all, I've a Snapdragon 801 and I'm looking for an optimized player to see Full HD H265 videos. I tried with a 1920x1080 8 bit 4,7Mbps video but:
1) With VLC it pretend to play smooth, but it lose the colours.. I tried all combinations, enabled HW acceleration, chosed the mediacodec (seems better between choices), it helps only a bit.
2) Tried MX player with dedicated codecs. Enabled HW acceleration as well, It lags.
3) MM video player lags (the video works about 5 fps) but it looks the best way to watch movie.
Any chance? maybe trying other settings, or a player with optimized ARM decoding.
Anyone would share a comment here?
Thank you for your opinion!
anyone interested?