That one plays perfectly. So it's not my n900. It's the encoding.

That's reassuring, though still as aggravating as ever. Thanks

I've given up for the night, and settled down with a bottle of baileys and a Triffid or three. Will try again tomorrow.

what is a triffid

Triffids: people-eating plants froma classic sci-fi, currently being serielised on TV in the UK. Best watched through a mild alcoholic haze, though they made great slurp and chomp noises.

... aaah that makes sense ... I've never tried ripping any of my DVDs to my computer ... and after reading this thread I think I may give moving DVDs to my n900 a miss for a week or three to give someone else a chance to work out the best way first! ... luckily mpg to mp4 isn't too hard, and I've a whole heap of stuff stored in an mpeg format ...

Hi, I'm new here and have an N900. I've been messing around with encoding to find something that works and doesn't need lots of re-encodes and is pretty simple to use.

Encoders: Handbrake 0.9.3 (Xvid) and 0.9.4 (H.264) on Windows 7 64bit.

Players tried: Media Player (GUI), mplayer (CLI)

Video 1: MKV container, H264 Video @ 720x592 25fps. 2 Audio tracks (AAC, AC3), 2 Subtitle tracks.
- this is the standard Handbrake 0.9.4 setting, the movie's original audio was stereo
- checked using mplayer and SiB (frontend)
- Audio: it plays audio perfectly (both the 128kbit AAC track and the 192kbit AC3 track, using -aid to pick)
- Video: it detects H264 and plays using ffmpeg fine as well and rescales to the correct aspect ratio; however, it plays at ~ 20fps, and so loses sync to the audio within a short while
- Subtitles: it plays these perfectly, in sync absolutely with the audio, using -sid to pick

There is obviously some trick to this It is so close, so I think it's easily possible in some way to optimise the encoder to not slow down the video so much.
- framedrop: results in blank video output
- lavdopts: kept crashing on launch, I was just playing around here, but I don't think it's an mplayer issue really!
- scale: I can't find out how to put in [ or ] brackets so haven't been able to try this.
Video 2: AVI container, Xvid video at 720x592, Audio MP3 (downmixed from AC3 5.1 on DVD), subtitles encoded using standard Handbrake tickbox.
- using standard Handbrake 0.9.3 settings (including Anamoprhic on ! - this was testing)
- plays perfectly, except of course it is playign in 4:3 mode and there is no aspect adjustment possible, so you get your widescreen movie squashed up.
- re-encoded no anamorphic adjustment: perfect aspect ratio, full screen.

Obviously it would be great to be able to keep standard MKVs with all tracks available. The solution in the short term would be keeping Xvid as the video codec, but having all options for audio incl. 5.1 and subs in the MKV file. mplayer seems to have no trouble picking up the available options, but SiB is pretty basic as a frontend and doesn't have options for picking specific tracks in the MKV, so CLI is the only option so far.

Ideally:
1. Continue to play with H264 settings and find the sweet spot to get video framerates resolved.
2. A nice frontend for mplayer to replace the built in one on the N900.

Ok Kathy. Tomorrow when you want to try again .

I have attached a text file that is a preset.. direct copy of texaslabrat's a few pages back. Save this file anywhere. Rename this to "Preset.plist".

Open HandBrake
On the bottom right click "Options"
Click "Import"
Find Preset.plist file
Click "OK" (or "Open")

You should have a new preset on the right that says "MY-mpeg4-mobile". Try ripping one of your episodes using that and see if it works.

Windows interface may be different than linux... so I can't guarantee these will be in the same spot... but I think they are.

Just tried the preset file import and it comes up with the error: Value of '0' is not valid for Value. Value should be between Minimum and Maximum.

Strange... could the preset file formats be different for Linux and Windows?

Can anyone else confirm?? I've downloaded and imported into HB a few times to test.

Oh... you know what... I have an SVN version of HandBrake... let me get something more stable and try it.

Nope.. still works for me in 0.9.4 64-bit =-(... odd.

has any tried using Mediaraptor to convert movies for the n900?