Video Encoding and Playback help & advice

Hi all, hope you can help a  newbie on the forum.
    I have had my SPV M700 for  over a year now and still haven't got video playback to work properly! Admittedly  I gave up after experimenting for a couple of weeks with poor results but I’m  back on the case again and am determined to get good results.
I have TCPMP player, an XP  machine, a host of video codec’s / direct show filters and encoders.
  I am hoping others on the forum would  share their experience and settings with encoding and playing video on the  m700/trinity? I am interested in encoding TV episodes and movies from  (mainly) avi files.
  I have tried a plethora of encoders and apps all with bad or no results. The  only app I got to work is spb mobile DVD (has really nice option to crop  the screen) but it's trial ware and the wmv format doesn't seem to be the  best quality.

  What is the best format to use for  playback? and player
  -I tried AVI using pocketdivx but the playback is choppy and blocky and totally  unwatchable it also seems to mess up the control buttons in TCPMP player  (weird!).
  -I tried MPEG I using TMPGEnc which produced good quality image but will pause  and not recover at some point in playback.
  -I tried WMV using the above spb software which actually produces a video that  will play without a glitch but the quality isn't too great and isn't free. For  some strange reason I can't use windows media encoder as it crashes and  won't recognise my device!

  What are the correct video settings  for playback? Resolution / frame rate and anything else I may need to know?

  Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! I'm finding this quite frustrating after  doing weeks of legwork, so now I’m asking for help.

Ok I have been slightly  dumb!

        The best option for video  playback is to use TCPMP on  your device. Experiment with the video options in TCPMP, this is where I was  having most of my problems, I found the “raw framebuffer” option to work best  for the encodes I was producing.

            The best option to encode  video definitely is to use pocketdivx  (when your using the right settings in TCPMP! loll). It’s really easy to use! I  like to use the high quality settings and produces around 2 hrs of video from  an avi file into around 300mb of avi for the device. Read the manual to choose  the best quality settings.
I would have to comment that  the audio can be a bit squelchy even on high audio settings but the m700  bass fix helped with this.

    I also tried converting DVD  video by using something like vobmerge  to first merge all the vob files from a dvd (home DVD not something  copyrighted!) into one big vob file allowing pocket divx to produce a whole  video with excellent results.

                    I tried a few other options  for encoding video. I used the much slated winavi as I was short on time….
Avi > MPEG1 Produced even  better results than pocket divx files but the file size is huge for a good  quality result (800mb avi produced 1gb mpeg) Good audio too. I encoded video to  25fps with frame size at 320x240 (full screen on device)
AVI > WMV Used the  pocketpc template in winavi for this and as with other wmv tests produces slightly  blurry video and the audio is just ok. Not my favourite, but low file size and  might be better for short clips.

        This is maybe a bit unrelated,  but, I couldn’t playback most of my matroska (mkv) files on my m700 or even  convert them with pocket divx or through demuxing them until I found this  brilliant software AlltoAVI. It  automatically converts the mkv container to an avi container, allowing you to  choose audio and subtitle streams on the way. You will still end up with the  original streams from the mkv like h264 video but most encoders will manage to  cope with the file after.

        Hopefully this will help  some people who have been equally daft as me!

Edited by bipolarbear, 13 June 2008 - 01:04 PM.