BETA PLAYER, new player, BEST Player

[Guest barkythedog]

i use my archos av380 to ripp anything my amp sees even my xbox games look good and anything on sky and dvd then convert using pocketDivexencoder top results

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

If your DVD is not protected (I.E. home made, non commercial etc) then you can point PocketDivXEncoder directly at the VOB on the DVD and off you go.

If you are using a commercial DVD then these are encrypted and PocketDivXEncoder will not read them (its not supposed to!). In this case I use DVD Decrypter which is free and can be obtained from Doom9 (mentioned earlier) and this basically creates an un-protected DVD version of the DVD on your hard drive.

Put your DVD in then start DVD Decrypter then click on Tools, Settings then click on File Mode and set File Splitting to none then click on IFO Mode and set File Splitting to none again, then click on OK

DVD Decrypt by default only selects the movie and ignores the menu's extra's etc so all you need to do is click on DVD icon at the bottom of the page and off it goes.

In about 10 - 15 mins it will finish, make a note of the path in the Destination panel then exit from here.

Open PocketDivXEncoder for the file to encode point this to the path from earlier and select the VOB file, set the output file somewhere handy.

Personal settings I always set video quality to 1 (lets face it its a 170x220 screen) but depending on the film I may increase this to 4 or 6.

Audio quality again down to 1 then click on the > to the left of this and set the middle one to 16kps.

Click on Advanced options, select SmartPhone set the orientation to how you like then tick VHQ and XVid then set Framerate to 25fps and set to AVI with MP3 audio.

Click on Preview make sure it looks ok then when you are happy click on Direct Encoding, if the machine is doing nothing else set this to highest priority and come back in around 30 mins.

Thats it commercial DVD to SmartPhone in 2 steps and less than 1 hour for both (LOTR may take a lot longer :wink: )

[Guest Blakey]

Doctor, you are a star! You have my thanks. LotR here we come! :-)

One more question: given the settings you recommend, what sort of hour/mb ratio are we talking with the final product for the smartphone?

Cheers

Blakey

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

Lot depends on how fast your machine is.

I have a twin Pentium III 1.0Ghz, 1Gb ram and to do an average 90min film it takes approx 10 - 15 mins to decrypt and 30 - 40 mins to convert to AVI.

It does not vary that much from different films only +- 5/10 mins overall. These things don't tend to be linear so a 180min file would not take 60 -80mins, its going to be a matter of suck it and see.

Good luck it may be like watching paint dry :roll:

[Guest Blakey]

Am in the process of doing it now. :-) LotR1 extended edition is on 2 DVD's. Each DVD has about 7 VOB files of 1 GB each (approx). First few efforts failed using your (excellent) advice as the resulting single VOB file is bigger than 4GB (Fat 32 I assume has a max of 4GB per file). So I have ripped it on a one for one basis from DVD to HD. All that took about 20 mins per DVD.

I then converted using PDE and it only asks for one VOB file. But it happily collects all the VOBs in that directory and sticks them into one AVI file. Good stuff. It has finished converting the first DVD into an AVI file which has come out at 100mb for 1:41 hours of playing time.

Have now copyed this file to my SD card via activesync (took forever!!!)

Impression: not brilliant actually! :-)

I'm going to go back and re-rip the DVDs into one file per chapter and then convert them at a higher rate of video and audio. I'd rather have lots of big chapter files of top quality than one big file of the whole DVD which isn't so good.

Still, I've got the whole of the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring on my phone in 2 x 100mb files! No one I know can say that!!!!!! :-)

Blakey

[Guest Blakey]

Update: One file per chapter is a bad idea. The chapters are too small and you get loads of files to upload to betaplayer. Gone back and taken the original VOBS and generated one avi file per disk again now. With a setting of 6 for video and 6 for audio you get 200Mb avi file per disk. This is slightly too big for me as I can't fit both onto my 512MB SD card alongside all my mapopols maps. So I guess I'm going to have to fine tune the numbers. Will try 6 vid and 4 audio next as per your suggestions, Doctor.

One side question comes out of this: copying a 100Mb file from PC to phone via active sync takes ages. Do the SD card readers do this alot faster? And what sort of price are they? Plus, from a future proofing (c500) point of view, can you write Mini SD's (inside an SD sleeve) with a card reader?

Thanks

Blakey

[Guest maxh2003]

Do the SD card readers do this alot faster? And what sort of price are they?

I'd say my USB card reader works maybe four or five times faster than ActiveSync for copying files. It cost me about a tenner. Also it's less prone to timing out halfway through transferring a large file.

[Guest serialkillazzs]

i fully agree with u there max, way faster big time

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

I use a card reader as well to upload movies as well.

I have the same problem with the size of the movies which is why I use those settings, if you drop video and audio both down to 1 then most films are 70Mb.

Audio I definatley leave at 1 as its a small speaker, not much point pushing it higher.

Video I start at 1 but if the file has lots of camera pans or lots of cgi/fast action then it needs to go up a bit, 2 does not seem to do much so I go for 4 or 6 depending on what the film is like.

[Guest De-GeXte]

Hi all,

I have this little problem with beta player. I use beta player for playing music mainly so i want the backlight to turn off after a while. I found this option called "No backlight keepalive" on the settingspage but even with this option switched on the backlight doesn't turn off after a while.

Any of you noticed the same problem ? And is there a solution, cuz now it eats my battery :)

[Guest SMYKUL]

I have had problems with that option before, best thing i can suggest is just keep restarting the app and toggling the option, i did this with general messing when it wouldn't do as it was told and eventually it just seemed to work itself out. Mine now works 99% of the time. I know that is not much help, but until the next version comes out we are all stuck with it. btw are u using version 0.4 or the 0.7 one ? would be interesting to see if this problem has been in all versions.

[Guest De-GeXte]

Using version 0.04 now. ill try the newer one soon! Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest De-GeXte]

Sorry but i cant find version 0.7 you are talking about on the beta player site. Seems like 0.04 is the most recent one :S

I think you cunfused it with some other player or so ?

[Guest martin]

This is the link the Picard posted earlier (unstable versions for testing) :wink:

http://forge.topcat.hu/frs/?group_id=5

[Guest De-GeXte]

Using the newest unstable version now. 0.8 and backlight turns off now :) jippy !!

[Guest djfuego]

You know it just hit me as I plugged my spv into my nice spanky amp with kick ass speakers n sub, that all this beta player needs is to use the IR port on the spv so you can use a remote control with it.

Save me having to get out of bed and pick up my phone just use a remote control to tell Beta player to skip next, prev, play and stop.

8)

That would be the icing on the cake.

[Guest schriss]

Yea, I was always wondering why I can use any IR Remote Control program with my new Pocket PC (its VERY new and soft is old so its not hardware specific), while there is nothing like this for Smartphones??

[Guest ollnie]

xcuse me if this is an stupid qestion but im still unsure of how 2 to do.

Do i have 2 uninstall the old version 1st before i install the newest (unstable 8 something)

Still a newbie but learning at highwayspeed

[Guest De-GeXte]

xcuse me if this is an stupid qestion but im still unsure of how 2 to do.

Do i have 2 uninstall the old version 1st before i install the newest (unstable 8 something)

Still a newbie but learning at highwayspeed

I uninstalled the old one and then installed the unstable 0.8 and it works so i would say the anwser to your quest ion is "yes" :)

[Guest De-GeXte]

Using the newest unstable version now. 0.8 and backlight turns off now :) jippy !!

Damn the backlight only dims it doesnt turn off completely. Anybody else having this problem ?

[Guest picard_beta]

you mean the screen doesn't turn off? or the backlight has different levels?

i think the screen won't turn off completly because i constantly call a function which prevents the home screen to auto return. if it would return the audio would stutter for a while (or maybe when the screen turns off, i'am not sure anymore).

[Guest schriss]

8)

[Guest arman68]

i think the screen won't turn off completly because i constantly call a function which prevents the home screen to auto return. if it would return the audio would stutter for a while (or maybe when the screen turns off, i'am not sure anymore).

You know what would be great?

It is to have a homescreen plugin for betaplayer, and let it return to homescreen while continuing playback for audio formats.

Ideally the homescreen plugin would show the currently playing song, toggle play/pause with select, and use left and right for previous and next song.

[Guest The PocketTV Team]

i think the screen won't turn off completly because i constantly call a function which prevents the http://smartphone.modaco.com/viewforum.php?f=43>home screen to auto return.

you should call SHIdleTimerReset only while you play video in foreground, not when you are paused or stopped, or when you play audio and allow background playing.

[Guest picard_beta]

you should call SHIdleTimerReset only while you play video in foreground, not when you are paused or stopped, or when you play audio and allow background playing.

i got reports of stuttering when i didn't call SHIdleTimerReset with audio playback (for a few seconds i have it too. and it's quite annoying when you start audio playback "close" the phone and after few minutes (what you set in homescreen timer) the audio stutters) i think media player calls it too. but i will add an option so the user can decide.