My wife doesn't understand.
Several weeks ago, for the span of about two weeks I had been trying to pick media players out for the N800. This has necessitated a lot of back and forth, to and fro, long hours hunched over my glowing screen. "You care more about that thing than me," she chides. Which, of course, is untrue - but given the fact that almost all spare time has been devoted to installing and uninstalling apps, repositories and libraries - I can hardly blame her for the appearance.
Nobody tells you what you really need to know to enjoy video. And with all the different things out there, it's really tough to figure it all out. A lot of chaff, and a lot of bad stuff.... But.... this is what I think needs to happen so you can turn your N800 into a multimedia powerhouse.
As I understand it, there are three pieces to multi-media: music, pictures, and video. And the first thing I decided was that the native apps on the N800 - Images and Media player - were surprisingly okay in handling those three. No bells and whistles, but they do a good job. Images ain't bad at all - includes a slide show mode, and the quick 30 second drill revealed it could do most things. Playing music with Media player was a little weak - the interface seems a little scooby and playlisting is ... difficult, plus no album cover art. But as a video player, it does a much better job.
But I wanted something with more pizzaz. I wanted a reason to listen to the music on my N800 over using my iPod. Since the iPod has a great, intuitive interface - that's going to be real tough to pull off. But with a sample of music on my N800, I wanted to plug it in at work, hook up my headphones, and listen to the stuff I usually like to listen to. Leave my iPod for more obscure stuff, car listening, mobile listening, etc. I figure this might persuade me to listen to more FM radio, and use the N800 (rather than work's internet) for calendar entries and non-essential email, maybe even use it as an interface for SMS with my phone over bluetooth. And maybe ... maybe ... watch a couple of movies I've wanted to watch but haven't had time.
I'll get to music and pictures in a second, but my choices really seem to be driven by video playing.
Now, my understanding is that the various video players out there - Video Center, UKMP, Media Box, and Canola2 - all use either Media player or MPlayer (another video player) to do their heavy lifting. I've read a lot of reviews, and a lot of people swear by MPlayer; it reportedly has superior codec support. But I just couldn't get Mplayer to work for me. There was usually an extremely annoying lag between what the people on the screen were saying and what they said. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying ... for like a full second afterwards. So no MPlayer.
Of all those video players, only Canola 2 handled all multi media - music, pics, and video. It has a nice interface, and it's being upgraded all the time thanks to a dedicated core group of developers. Already there have been 2 fairly major updates, new music formats added, etc. Beats the pants off the other stuff. Plus, Canola 2 has album art and can pull in Internet feeds (podcasts, videocasts, photocasts, etc.) Got the nifty kinetic scrolling, and pictures look gorgeous on it. Some lag problems on start up and navigating to big photo stores (seem to have gotten better in the latest update) - but that may be worked around by doing some logical organization.... Also, there are a couple of utilities that help with album art and video thumbnails.
The lack of codecs isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me. The reason for this is, even with MPlayer I would have had to rip and recode video because I don't have a library of digital video already. Yeah - if you've got some digital videos, MPlayer is prolly better - but chances are you would have to recode for file and screen size. So I have the advantage of being a noob here.
Following Aisu/Ty/Penguin Geek's advice, I use Handbrake (with DVD43) to rip video from DVDs. I'm kinda playing with settings a little, and Ty says something along the lines of - it doesn't matter how you code the thing just so long as you get it digitized. It sorta lightly sucks that I can't rip from DVD directly to an N800-compatible file, but into each life.... [Settings?]
From there? I use Urho Konttori's (the guy who made UKMP) Media Converter to convert the digital video to an optimized format for the N800. Drag and drop, super easy.
Of all these things, getting Handbrake to rip the DVD (I think some of the protections are just too strong, and some of the DVDs are too weird) is the hardest part. It is also time consuming. I set up Handbrake to rip the DVD, and walk away (preferably to bed). Wake up the next morning, and use Media Converter on the new digital file (assuming everything worked) to create the N800 version. And then I go to work. And if everything worked (cross my fingers), I have a new N800 formatted video that evening.
I'm batting about .500 thus far.
So, the bottom line this....
N800: Canola2 using the built-in media player
Software: Handbrake, DVD43, Media Converter
Process:
1. Rip DVD using Handbrake
2. Go to Bed
3. Wake up next morning and use Media Converter to format the digital video for the N800
4. Go to work
5. Come home and copy N800 file to N800, delete it from the main machine, and test it
6. Delete Handbrake file
7. Delete and Repeat as necessary
PS - tried again last night, and two things:
A. The earlier vids I decoded no longer worked.... Tried it late at night, but they would load up in both Canola and Media Player (the N800's native app), but I'd just get a black screen. Now I had done a lot of stuff (upgraded Canola and Modest and GPE and a bunch of other stuff), so maybe it was a memory issue, but....
B. I found instructions on MaemoApps for using Handbrake to get to a N800 file. The key seemed to be specify an average bit rate of 1000. I ripped it, but I haven't tried it out yet. Tonight I'll load it up and see if it works. The comments suggest the Output resolution needs to drop to 400x224.... So if it doesn't, guess I'll try that, and then on to Media Converter....
Update 3/25/2008:
Okay - the Handbrake straight to N800 didn't work.
Played around for awhile, and this is what I found:
Handbrake - I use the AppleTV preset. Documentation says AppleTV gives the best image and was middle of the pack in terms of speed, so.... Might take awhile, but I know I started it off Saturday afternoon, went out, and when I woke up with a bit of a hangover the next day, it was done. It was, however, over 1 Gig.
Media Converter - I used the N800 Very Good setting ( I think). It's rated at like 13fps. Don't ask me why the N800 Good setting at 18fps is worse than the N800 Very Good @ 13fps; I don't know. Final file size: 257 Megs.
Video quality was generally pretty good; audio quality I thought was excellent. (This was a Jethro Tull music DVD). Color looked bright, images were for the most part very clear. There was some distortion when Ian Anderson was hopping all over the stage; it wasn't the pixellation I got on an action flick, but the image sort of developed all these "scan lines" around the body part that was flapping around the most...
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