I have a few questions regarding the N810, video support and such.

To start off, I guess the N810 doesn't have support for MKV. This is a pity considering it's growth as a container format. C'est la vie. It seems the device does support AVI, though. I suppose that's something if not the best option. This leads to question one: will there *ever* be support for MKV?

I've seen a few options for converting video to a format supported by the device. Unfortunately, they are all Windows apps. I find this ironic considering the love of the device coming from the Linux world. Hell, the device itself runs Linux. Question 2: are there *any* applications which will convert the format within Linux?

I'm aware of mencoder but I've unsuccessfully used it. Perhaps a HowTo for using mencoder for converting video could be made by someone that knows what they're doing.

To quote GeneralAntilles:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Video_encoding




I'm using tablet-encode on Ubuntu right now, and you can use the command line if you like, as a working (in more ways than one) statement I am using:

for 1-pass. For 2-pass, just change the "-lameopts cbrreset=96" to "copy" and set the outfile as /dev/null, then do the second pass as the above line and use pass=2 where pass=1 now.


Joe

Install Mplayer.

It can't play high res and/or h.264/AVC video well, but it'll play more modest videos in a myriad of formats.

I've been encoding and transcoding via cli for three days now, and having good success. My standard cli statement is pretty much the same as I mentioned above, except I use 480:360 over 400:240 since that works better for me (in terms of bitrate mostly; 650 bitrate just works best imo). I'm still looking for ways to control bitrate, which is the reason I went off on the cli thing from the standard converters mentioned on that wiki page. If you use that command mentioned above, your bitrate won't be 800; that's a work-in-progress atm, but the converters on the wiki page don't come much closer than I have as of yet, so I think video bitrate is not something you can have tight control over; at least not as tight as audio bitrate.

To remove black letterbox bars with cli, the suggestion on this page worked perfectly for me yesterday:

http://www.axllent.org/docs/video/mencoder_dvd_to_mpeg4

Scroll down to: "Console Commands Here are the three commends I used..." topmost box for the mencoder letterbox crop numbers command, then plug in the numbers you get after running it into a part of the video where you're sure the letterbox bars are showing. This section also gives you an idea on how to do the two-pass run efficiently, as well as how to raise the volume level and other stuff.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/HOWTO...oduction_Guide

...was helpful but most of it was obvious by the time I found that page. A good starting point though.

http://quadpoint.org/projects/simplerip

...was somewhat helpful, too. Not in terms of the calculator but from other stuff and links on the page.



As mentioned in the following thread, I'm looking into how to (cli) transcode audio at 44.1kHz instead of 48kHz, (post #8), since it's well known that 48kHz audio gives a performance hit, as well as the bitrate cap mentioned by atilla77 (post #17).

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=27496

Any further cli information you can suggest would be welcome.


Joe.

Thanks Joe. You've certainly enlightened me. I'm anxious to see how tablet-encode handles my needs.

You're welcome. Be sure to check the help and readme, as there are quite a few things you can do to customize/ modify it.

Joe

I've been using avi for years and find it the most compatible format out there, thus I don't even bother with MKV. If I find one, I tend to downconvert it to AVI just to eleviate any headaches I might otherwise have with MKV. Once MKV has been mainstream long enough, I might move to it, but for now, no.