Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Unless I misread earlier posts, or he wasn't very clear...
I believe this is what jakiman was talking about.
What you outlined is what most folks do... Problem is...
Devices like SGSII for e.g, will handle higher A/V bit-rates* for their res than the N9.
But then I guess you eventually get to a point of diminishing returns anyway.

*or just better (more efficient) CODECS

Did you read Copernicus's post? It's not as simple as "720p = l337".
You want native res but at the highest bit-rate (or most efficient codec) your ph can handle.
If a ph can re-encode to perfect parameters on-the-fly & not even blink awesome, but I doubt many can.

I'd rather have good source material that I can re-encode exactly the way I want.
Then again I'm not inclined to be "leeching" heaps of content off the net.
In that scenario I guess "Begger's can't always be choosers".

That N900 720p playback you speak of was a very recent development.
As I understand it, it was possible thanks to files that originated from the N9/N950.
All it does is help the N900 do what the N9 does now...

Hopefully we'll eventually be able to OC the N9 to a point whereby it'll handle the most challenging formats.
The N9's OMAP3630 is basically a OMAP3430 die-shrunk to 45nm.
It's CPU/GPU/DSP's are clocked higher, & will have room for OC'ing beyond the N900's stable limits.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I truly am because i'm willing to buy this device despite all the shortcomings it has.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

100% agreed with you...
Specially watching how it's made ! So sexy...lol

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

You are hilarious in the sense that you have no idea what you are talking about concerning 720p. Your N900 is playing 720p thanks to the N9/N950.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

^ beat me to it before I could edit my post :)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Okay, this Thread is perhaps the best place for some kind of advertising. The Codec is important, yes, but more important (because we are all able to reencode our videos) is how the video player handles our videos:

I would prefer a possibility to continue videoplayback while checking twitter, so please vote at the nokia ideas project: ;)

• Making the N9 the best video player

• keep playing videos in background while multitasking

• Music Player and video player seek bar gesture.

• a option in which you enter the GOTO TIME

Those are not my ideas. But I can feel their pain. At Idea 3 I would personally prefer buttons like at Panucci with a fixed index to jump, but a gestue would be also a working solution. :)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Very well but that doesn't change THE fact.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

What fact? That both play 720p equally or the one where Nokia already announced that a Harmattan device will feature an OMAP 3?

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

fwiw I have read on konttori blog that for PR1.2 the H264 has decoder enhancements
that means better but that does not mean that everybody will be happy then!

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Please, I know this information quite well. No need to explain what HD is to me as if I don't know what it means. =P I guess you didn't read my post properly or just ignored it. I was talking about playing back commonly downloadable videos from the net. I gave Youtube example as that is a VERY common source for many.

1. Go to youtube
2. Find a video i want to play on N9
3. Download it (using some app on phone or PC etc)
4. Watch it

Now, on the N9, either I have to settle with crappier quality video as N9 cannot play HD or higher version. (as they are H264 high profile) So I have to download the higher quality video/audio and encode it for N9 to get the best of what youtube offers. I told you that Youtube HD video isn't just about resolution. It also has more resolvable detail and better quality audio which is retained no matter if your phone has less than HD resolution display.

Now compare this to SGS2 for example. I can just play 720p or 1080p video from youtube without wasting a single minute or having to settle with lower quality video and audio. Which do you prefer? N9? I don't want maximum quality picture with minimum distortion when I have to waste time to encode my videos before being able to copy it on to my phone. Why do that when you can get just simply copy the high resolution, high bitrate "original" video and just play it without "recompressing" the video to a lower bitrate, lower resolution video on some other phone? (Heck, SGS2 or many others can just play them directly from the youtube website)

It also avoids me having 2 copies of the same video and waste more space on my PC.

Also, encoded version can never surpass the source. Re-scaling using a dedicated DSP does just as good of a job also. You will not see a single difference. I know what you are trying to say and sounds good in theory. But in practice, the difference is negligible or not even visible. (not on a tiny mobile phone screen size that's for sure)

Anyways, just saying that N9 is a crappy video player for many people's needs right now. It's less capable and less convenient with barely no features than current competition unfortunately. (I was quite glad however to find out the dev at least implemented fill screen option using pinch-to-zoom)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Yes, N9 can play main profile H264 but it's quite picky atm. I hope they address the stuttering of videos when bframes are in use etc.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Just tried this video on my N950:

http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/9536/nokialame.jpg

Unwatchable due to frame skipping. Nokia, I am disappoint. :/

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Need more info than that to see why it's failing.
As we know, H264 (AVC) High profile is not possible.
This is a hardware limitation of the OMAP3 SoC. :(
So even if it's only 720x400 resolution, it will stutter.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

And that's also what I'm talking about. I do use Handbrake for pretty much anything, including Youtube videos. (Although, I admit I don't get too much off of Youtube these days.) Basically, if I don't care enough about the video to re-encode it, I really don't care enough about the video to watch it in the first place...

If you mean by "resolvable detail" the amount of compression rather than the amount of resolution, then again, my argument is to re-encode the high-quality video to the proper resolution. You'll get the best results that way. And, of course, the audio stream is left untouched by this process.

Sure, if this is some video I don't care about, I agree it is convenient to throw a mismatched video at a device and still be able to view it. My argument, however, is that even if you can play a 720p or 1080p video on your phone, the result will inevitably be a lesser experience.

No matter how much hardware you throw at it, HD video displayed on a 854x480 lcd screen must suffer compared to the same video encoded at the precise resolution required by the display. Decompressing and downscaling simply requires more effort than decompressing alone. Any time spent downscaling is time that could have been better spent on supporting a higher bitrate, or on multitasking, or on saving battery juice. The extra resolution in the HD video wastes both storage space and internal data bandwidth. I just don't see the point of forcing inappropriately sized video onto a cell phone...

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I can see both sides of this argument but downloaded handbrake and I am wondering if you could give some advice on settings? I noticed there are presets for iphone etc, would be nice to have one for N9/N950...

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

This is where we are not syncing in this argument. You are talking about theory again. In real life, I can guarantee you that there is no visible difference to the quality of the video by downscaling. Not to our eyes anyways I assure you. Especially on a tiny mobile phone display. A perfectly encoded FWVGA resolution video looks identical to the 720p original source video being playing on the same phone.

Also, video decoding is all done by a dedicated DSP chip and is not done by the CPU or GPU. So their performance isn't compromised regardless of how big the video is.

I guess you don't watch a lot of videos on your phone. So you don't really understand how big of a benefit it is to not having to encode videos all the time. It's a huge waste of time, storage and electricity encoding videos when it isn't needed on other phones. (by storage, I mean PC storage as you have to keep 2 copies of the same video if you want to keep the higher quality source video while keeping another copy for your incapable mobile phone for later viewing if you don't want to re-encode again)

I guess I care about this much more than most here. :p

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I recommend you to try xvid4psp daily build also.
http://www.winnydows.com/downloads/X...4PSP_DAILY.exe

Just create a new MP4 profile, set max resolution to 854x480. Then use H264 Base profile for video. Bit rate to what you prefer your video size to be. I just use 200 min 1500 max. (but you do lower max if you prefer smaller video size) I'm at work so can't remember everything exactly but it's not difficult to figure out. (xvid4psp does not require you to have any codec installed on your Windows.)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Yeah, I kinda gave up looking for a good preset a while back. There are some floating around, but I generally just mess with the settings myself.

I haven't played with my settings in a while. Let's see... On my current version of Handbrake (0.9.5 on OS X), starting with the "normal" preset, you should already have the video codec set to "H.264 (x264)" on the "video" tab. The first thing to do is to go to the "Advanced" tab, and set things up for a baseline profile: this means setting "Maximum B-Frames" to 0, switching off "CABAC Entropy Coding", and turning off "Weighted P-Frames". This should be enough to start with. I know that videos encoded using this setup will work fine in media player on my N900.

After that, things are really up to you. Use the "Picture Settings" icon at the top of the window to set the video dimensions to whatever you want (presumably to something within the range of your phone's native resolution!). You can manage the amount of compression in a variety of ways on the "video" tab, and the "advanced" tab has even more ways to tweak the compression (at the cost of letting Handbrake take longer to do its job). Both the MP4 and MKV file formats should work fine, choose whichever you prefer.

There are some resources availabe here at Maemo.org. In particular, the wiki has its own video encoding page (covering Handbrake and a number of other encoding options):

http://wiki.maemo.org/Video_encoding

There are a number of Handbrake-related threads floating around as well, though I don't think any one of them is a perfect resource. Anyway, a search for "Handbrake" here should turn up some good stuff.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

If your hardware is good enough to do it without stuttering, without pausing, without de-synching the audio, and without any artifacting, then sure, there's no visible difference. Still, even if this is the case, you've gotta admit the machine is doing lots more work under the hood, for absolutely no profit on the screen.

In a sense, I suppose you're right. I'm an Anime addict, so the videos I tend to view on my phone are mostly selections from my library of DVDs. I'll load a season of 24 episodes onto my computer, queue them up in Handbrake, and let the machine run overnight. I don't mind at all the cost of creating and storing "mobile" versions of my video library.

For me, the only video I want to watch in high quality are those that I want to play again and again. If you're just interested in watching some Youtube video that you'll look at once and never worry about again, why bother watching it in HD at all? Low resolution is fine for junk video...

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I just want the best quality for least effort and in shortest time. :D
Last thing I want to do is constantly have to re-encode videos.
Hence why I prefer to have a phone which can play everything.
I'm even considering the Samsung Galaxy Note. (5.3" monster) :p
Lack of powerful HW on Nokia phones is pushing me away... :(

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Higher quality at the expense of battery life??? How long will you be able to watch videos before your phone goes dead?

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Over 8 hours according to GSMArena test. (even longer if you keep the brightness down) Well, Galaxy Note has even a bigger battery than SGS2. But bigger screen. So i expect it to last similar to SGS2 for video playback. My brother in law who is a Samsung mobile phone hardware engineer told me that Galaxy Note's SoC is more efficient than SGS2's SoC also. (he also said it can be overclocked more. lol)

http://blog.gsmarena.com/nokia-n9-do...e-charge-test/

Also, keep in mind that SGS2 has a 0.4" bigger display with more sub-pixels than N9. It's actually the best you can get right now if you are going on some 14 hour flight as SGS2 has replaceable batteries unlike iPhone4/SGS2. So you can simply pop another fully charged battery and you have another 8 hours. That's not possible (without a screwdriver) on most recent Nokia phones (N8, E7, X7, N9 etc) as well as iPhone4/4S. N900 doesn't last as long as N9 or SGS2 but at least it also has a replaceable battery. (I have 2 spare) Anyways, who watches 8 hours straight of video? Even I don't do that. I took my Nokia E7 for my recent 10 hour plane trip and I watched around 5 hours of video and still had some juice left over. I was more than happy with that. (but yeah, if I was going to UK from Sydney, it would be over 18 hour flight (including transfers) and for that my N8, E7, N9 etc won't be enough. I also do not want to carry some battery charger. just not convenient. (popping in a new battery is soooooo much better. No butts about it.)

I wish N9 came with STE U8500 SoC as was in the initial rumor. :(

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Possible 8 hours, but not at 720p resolution. I wonder what video the N9 managed to decode for so long. It must have also been in offline mode.

SGNote has the SoC manufactured at a smaller process, hence the higher clock and efficiency.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

No idea what video they used. Also, I can't really say how accurate or comparable the results are between the different phones. (I questioned this in the comment section) But regardless, the DSP wouldn't use significantly more power for 720p video. It's what it's designed to do anyways. Maybe it'll shorten the battery life by 10-20% at most.

Yeah, Galaxy Nexus is interesting but for my "video" needs. It's definitely on my list of phones to get right now. (I also like the fact that it has a fairly accurate "built-in" stylus like the N900) OS is Android but I guess I'll have to live with that if Nokia doesn't do much more with Harmattan for their future phones.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Thank you guys, will make a try with Handbrake although it will take some time, maybe its possible to have handbrake automatically scan a folcer on the pc and encode copies of movies as they arrive?

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I imagine it is possible, but I'm not sure I would want to do that -- Handbrake requires a lot of processing to perform its job, and if (like me) you often have multiple hours of video to convert, it will happily consume all your CPU cycles for hours...

So I usually only want to start Handbrake during those times I won't be using my computer. (It does have a handy "pause" feature for those times you want to wrest back control of your CPU.)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I appreciate your answer, but I am a little picky...lol. If you guys are using Handbrake, then I'd like to use it as well. I tried searching settings for 720p baseline profiles but had no success... Whenever you have some free time at home, could you please just specify which setting to change in order to convert an (torrent-originated...) 720p mkv high to 720p mkv baseline profile. (Being again picky to choose mkv over mp4)

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Those who have many HD videos will care, those who dont, dont ;). The restriction is the internet speed - downloading a 1GB+ vid takes a lot longer than 350MB if the speed aint fast(& service provider says cannot upgrade any faster).

Btw, what sort of files can be played using the VLC player on N9? Has anyone tried rmvb files though I suppose not since ya all dont watch chinese shows

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

My current version of Handbrake (0.9.5) is pretty good about providing info on every available encoding option, I get a fairly detailed tooltip by just hovering the mouse above each option. But in short, once you've picked H.264 as your video codec on the "Video" tab, the way to make it a baseline profile is to switch to the "Advanced" tab, and make sure "Maximum B-Frames" are set to 0 and "CABAC Entropy Coding", "8x8 Transform", and "Weighted P-Frames" are all switched off. That should do it for you.

And yeah, I'll say it again -- playing 720p video on a cell phone is a waste of CPU cycles. Drop the resolution to the machine's native screen size, and use the savings in pixel count to increase the bitrate instead! (Although if you're starting from a heavily compressed video to begin with, I suppose that doesn't really matter.)

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem much advantage to choosing the mkv container over the mp4 one for the Nokia phones. At least on my N900, the default Media Player doesn't seem to support alternate audio tracks or any sort of subtitles. Without that, most of the advantages of using the Matroska container are lost...

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

this is what i'm using currently; pass it the path to the source file. i use it to make phone-ready files based on raw mkv files.

#!/bin/bash

get_file_from_path() {
OIFS=$IFS
IFS='/'
for x in $1
do
OUTPUT=$x
done
IFS=$OIFS
}

get_file_from_path $1

OUTPUT="${OUTPUT%.*}.mp4"

echo $OUTPUT

ENCODE="-s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -b 1024k -bt 512k"
FORMAT="-f mp4"

VQ="-mbd rd -flags 4mv+part+aic -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300 -bf 3"
VIDEO="-vcodec mpeg4 $VQ"
AQ="-strict experimental -ab 192k -ac 2"
AUDIO="-acodec aac $AQ"

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i $1 $ENCODE $VIDEO $AUDIO $FORMAT $OUTPUT

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Very nice script! I'm a little confused about the encoding options, though:

You've got the aspect ratio set to 16:9, but have the frame size set to 720x480 (a 3:2 ratio)? I've never used ffmpeg, so I don't really know quite what that means as to the final video size.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

loool. my handbrake never ever reach 100% even i wait it for 2hiurs and more on windows 7 64 bit.
funny is it.
other converter never wait for 1hour

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Is your machine perhaps limited in RAM, or running other applications? Handbrake is one of the fancier, more powerful converters out there, and as such makes a lot of demands on a computer.

In my experience, if I avoid Handbrake's more agressive compression settings, I can re-encode a half-hour anime to fit my N900 in roughly 15 minutes. This is on a Core 2 Duo with 4 gigs of RAM.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Try using Freemake Video converter. Very easy, very clean, very nice. Windows only.

Use a converter called Super, for more power.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I'm using adobe media encoder and my output file is as follows:
NTSC, 854x480, 29.97 fps, Progressive
AAC, 192 kbps, 48 kHz, Stereo
CBR, 6.00Mbps

I've selected Baseline profile for the encoding. I am aware that 6.00Mbps bitrate is very high for playback, (1 hour of video is estimated at 2.9Gb!). So the thing is, what is a reasonable bitrate setting for the n9 stock player (or preferably ovp)? Also, is there a maximum bitrate setting that the n9 can handle?

thanks

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

Wouldn't it be smarter to lower the bitrate? I mean, since the new resolution is no longer 720p and the display is so small, I don't think that it will look bad on the N9 with a bitrate of, for example, only 3 Mbps.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

@marrat,

I already stated I am aware of the very high bitrate xD
So is 3Mbps reasonable? And more importantly, can the phone handle the bitrate?

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

stumbled upon this
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Commu...2F_Nokia_N9-00

so i guess 4Mbps is maximum?

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

The real problem in answering this question is that video quality is a rather squishy concept. Certainly, a higher bitrate means less compression, and therefore less loss of data. But just what is "reasonable" is entirely dependent on the viewer (and in many cases on the video as well).

Myself, I'm an anime addict. A lot of my favorite shows are pulled directly out of the world of manga (Japanese comic books), and are therefore often drawn in a flat, 2D style, with many fairly static scenes. Thus, you can sometimes get away with a pretty horrible bitrate and still have a watchable show, because the video data can handle a great deal of compression.

In short, I'm afraid the real answer is that you'll have to experiment to find out what is best for you. Yes, the video quality will always degrade as you reduce the bitrate, but a certain amount of degradation may be acceptable (or even imperceptible) -- and that judgement is ultimately yours to make.

Re: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
 

I use a max of 2Mbps for H264 Base profile at 854x480 resolution for my videos encoded for the N9. Anything more is not really noticeable for such a small screen IMO and uses extra space for nothing.