I changed mine to match Kathy's new one.. so when did you download them last?

Kathy has tested the one in my post now and it works.. so I put it there. The others ones chris tested for me were from me copying the linux one to my work computer, changing it in a text editor with what I *thought* the problem children were.. and re-uploading. But not re-tested.

At this point the one in Kathy's post, and mine are identical.

tablet-encode is a front end to mencoder, and mencoder will produce very close to bitrate targets. The n900 presets in tablet-encode are 2000kbps video and 192kbps audio. So a one hour tablet-encode video for the n900 will be about 2192*3600 = 7891200kilobits or 963MBytes

It's not quite that simple... for my desktop I use a very high quality setting in H.264 to rip my dvd's. I use constant quality, not CBR. I get around 1.5GB files for a full DVD that I watch on through mplayer onto an HDTV with no problems. Some are near 2GB. Near perfect DVD-upscaled quality. Not as good as the Blu-Ray files I have, but good enough to watch. Every movie is a different file size.

Now I would have expected an N900 rip to be a bit smaller, since you crop the video width. But I was going by Kathy's example file.

I have heard grainy videos tend to have larger filesizes, especially when using constant quality, and not CBR - and I think the wiki preset uses constant quality.. whereas my preset (texaslabrat's settings) are supposed to be using bitrates with a value of 600.. which would produce a much smaller, but lower quality video. The latter part appears to be true by Kathy's example, but according to handbrake it's not so much in the video tab.

However, when using constant quality.. the filesize of a movie can't really be determined.. since the bitrate of the video changes during the encoding.

Lower quality should be acceptable on such a small screen. It's not a 50 inch HDTV!

The original question by talmage was quite specific. The size of a video produced by tablet-encode with the n900 preset. The answer to that is nearly deterministic with a relatively small variance.

You're correct.. I overlooked him asking specifically about tablet-encode.

Please excuse me while I RTFM myself in the corner.

Oh yes, I have Mary Mungo and Midge in my collection, but they're rather a long way down.

The point of UK childrens TV of that era was the whimsy and gentle Humour (The Magic Roundabout was more appreciated by adults than children back then). American cartoons don't quiet 'get it'.

In other news, I am now fighting with wiki parsing to create a Seriously Stupid guide to video for n900.

Ok... people please climb in and edit, reparse, improve and generallt wiki-ise this page:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Video_Encoding_Basic_Guide
Thanks!

I am trying to find the Sweet Spot between File Size and Image Quality for videos on my N900 so I have done a bit of testing with different Handbrake options.

I am using Handbrake 0.9.4 on Windows 7 x64.

I am not worried about encode speed as in most cases, I will be encoding overnight while I sleep.

My test source is IT Crowd Series 1, Episode 1 (23:15min). Original source was a PAL DVD (720 x 576, aspect ratio 1.78). This was ripped to a hard drive VIDEO_TS folder using DVDFab's HD Decrypter.

For Handbrake Presets, I started with the iPhone/iPod Touch presets. Therefore, all my encodes are MP4 files using H.264 (video) and AAC (audio) with all options set as per the iPhone/iPod presets.

From there, I have only made minor adjustments to the SIZE and Constant Quality options.

I don't know much about all this encoding business, so I just tried playing around with some different options. Thought I would share my results for those that are interested.

In all cases, Keep Aspect Ratio=True and Anamorphic=NONE.

Size: 784 x 448
Constant Quality: 60.78% RF:20
File Size: 332,038 KB (Date Rate: 1819kbps)
(NB: Handbrake wouldn't let me select 800 x 448 for this source)

Size: 720 x 416
Constant Quality: 60.78% RF:20
File Size: 283,685 KB (Date Rate: 1535kbps)

Size: 704 x 400
Constant Quality: 60.78% RF:20
File Size: 265,925 KB (Data Rate: 1430kbps)

Size: 704 x 400
Constant Quality: 56.86% RF:22
File Size: 186,929 KB (Date Rate: 966kbps)

Size: 640 x 368
Constant Quality: 60.78% RF:20
File Size: 228,152 KB (Date Rate: 1209kbps)

Size: 640 x 368
Constant Quality: 56.86% RF:22
File Size: 163,616 KB (Date Rate: 830kbps)

Size: 416 x 240
Constant Quality: 60.78% RF:20
File Size: 125,389 KB (Date Rate: 607kbps)


Not surprisingly, 416x240 was too low a resolution to give a good image quality - image looks a bit fuzzy/blocky.

However, my eyes couldn't really perceive any difference between 784x448, 720x416, 704x400 & 640x368 at either Constant Quality setting.

Therefore, I might be going with 640 x 368/Constant Quality 56.86% RF:22 as this gives the smallest file with acceptable image quality.

Once your happy with your guide, put it on videohelp.com as well. Nice to see the N900 "namechecked" on there and more exposure for our device (and hopefully more adopters/developers).