Notices

I know it's not Windows, so it doesn't answer your question but since we are on a maemo-forum anyway, I don't feel bad about suggesting the following.

ffmpeg, available for the N900 as well as the N9, is light, fast and extremely versatile.

In it's simplest form you would do something like this on the terminal

If you need more than that, or need better quality of reencoding, have a look at the extensive documentation, to be found here:

http://ffmpeg.org/documentation.html

Like I said, I know it's not a windows solution, but IMO ffmpeg beats anything.

So far, with just one attempt, this is my before and after pictures playing something on YouTube now.





I'm sure that I can do even better with a little more tweaking and finding the perfect converting program as well.

I'm so happy on this.

I asked before awhile back but I don't believe ffmpeg was ever compiled for Maemo 4.

I sure wish that it was though... that would make everything so much easier for me.

Okay, one last and final question.

I use DownloadHelper for Firefox.

I've always thought of .flv as being a cheap and dirty encoding and it never displays that well on anything that I use.

Anyway, if I choose [Medium] to download a video from my computer (.mp4 format), it's still not as big of a file size as either [480p] or even [320p] both of which are an .flv extension.

So what would be the best format to download and then convert?

My tablet can only run a 640 by 340-350ish video screen size.

Cheers.

For what machine? mplayer for command line would be my best bet. Plays flv out of the box and does a decent job with an otherwise crappy format.

mplayer seems good but is there any gui also available for it or it needs to be run via commands only ?

http://www.pcfreetime.com/ (Format Factory) It is best and it can do anything!

and you can run it in Linux too. Wineticks corefonts and ffdshow (i don't know if it even need those, but it works)

There is a GUI, but it defeats the purpose of the command line version, I think. Some people, however, have reported good results with Sib mplayer.

Never did what I need, but your experiences may be different. That being said: The command line version offers so much more than the GUI can pack in such a tiny space that a CL player seems worth the effort of entering commands.

Give it a shot, and try the GUI. Then try and play a video which has subs that are slightly out of sync. When I try adjusting the sync settings with both Gnome-Mplayer (a joke) and VLC on my linux laptop. With VLC it kind of works, but only for a short period of time. Usually there is also a cap to the amount of adjusting one can apply. So not the case with mplayer on the command line. It allows for extreme adjusting if needed while giving all the regular goodies out of the box.

You need to look at the resolution - the [Medium] mp4 files are 640x360, the [480p] files are 854x480, which is almost twice as much pixels as [360p]. So it's clear why that file is smaller.
Also the H.264 codec used in .mp4 is more efficient than the ones used in .flv, So mp4 is superior but I wouldn't call flv crappy, it displays very well at a reasonable datarate (add 10-20% compared to mp4).
3gp files for older mobile devices have a resolution between 128×96 and 320×240 pixel and crappy audio so avoid them.

So what to choose for best quality 360p results? Either download max. resolution [1080p] files and resize them if you don't mind the traffic or simply take the [Medium] file and reencode while leaving resolution untouched.
Also, check out what max. datarate your tablet can handle.
To verify the datarate of a given video, you can use VLC>Extras>Codec-info. You won't gain anything when you increase datarate of the source alone at same resolution. But you might gain some quality if you downsize a HD video and increase datarate (compared to [360p] download).
It all comes down to datarate per pixel, you can use your pocket calculator for that.

I don't know how I managed to forget mentioning Knots2 for Maemo.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Knots2

I used it a couple of times to convert on the fly some movies I had, and sent them over LAN, optimized for the N900 (but that's just one of the many options), to my phone,which I had connected to a TV-set. It worked surprisingly well.

It took a bit of configuring but the client for Maemo was really decent.

For the diablo client look here:
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-d...free/k/knots2/
And look at the wiki for a server on the OS of your choice.

By the way, I noticed on the download page of ffmpeg that that are "static" builds available for armel, as well as regular debian packages for armel. You may have some luck over there.

http://www.deb-multimedia.org/pool/main/