Notices

Many Thanks for this thread, i being a super new guy love the information here. i have one problem, after using the suggestions here i still am unable to get anything but the included n810.avi file to play on canola. i think i have tried everything including blowing out the N800 and reloading (several times). canola plays music fine but nothing i convert and load to either the internal or external sd card will play. any thoughts on what maybe wrong. the version is installed from the application manager, both cards were formatted in the N800.
thanks
cdr

@seadeeare

Have you gone to the Canola settings and selected which cards you want scanned? Settings>>Media Library>>Media Folders>>Video Folders

YEp did that, i can see the title in the file list but when i go to play it just hangs; the time indicator at the bottom stalls at zero and the volumne bar drops by 2 . black screen and nothing.

I just tested another thing, i copied the Nokia_N810.avi vid from the device to the internal SD card and it gives me the same error. black screen no video no time. can't canola play vid from the SD cards either internal or external? could there be a problem with the SD cards i am using? they are both Transcend SDHC 8 gig cards.
thanks in advance
cdr

Canola can play from SD cards. The specific card type you are using has a positive history (use one myself).

Maybe you need to uninstall and re-install Canola. I guess if you do that, you ought to do a regular uninstall, then download and run Canola2-cleanup (one of your installable applications), then re-install Canola. Will it fix the problem? I don't know.

Also, you (and I) probably should be pursuing this on a thread dealing with Canola problems, not video quality, such as this one.

Thanks for the info GeraldKo, i'll try what you suggested and i will copy the results onto the thread you suggested for the Canola Problems.
cdr

This version works well but it often fails silently on two-pass encoding. By making the change proposed by Frank Banul in thread http://forums.internettablettalk.com...ad.php?t=25926 this is solved, so now it downsamples to 44100 and I can use a .tablet-encode.conf containing '$options{'two-pass'} = 1;'

From Frank's post:

It looks like development on this and almost every other N8*0 project is stopped but it would be nice to see a revised version of the script released so it can be found and enjoyed easily, instead of via a myriad of google searches, chance discovery of this unreleased version (which as far as I can tell is referenced nowhere except in this thread, and is not accessible via the usual garage/project pages), and DIY corrections.

People are still buying these devices

I have a gaming rig my brother mostly uses but it sports a core i7 sso ripping dvds takes a few minutes. In my experience the bit rate id the video makes a big difference. I don't know that much about it. Here are my settings for decent video. BTW I use handbrake.
container: avi
Format: mpeg4
resolution: 400 x 240
video bitrate: 1500
audio: Mp3

I was using Handbrake for a lot of stuff too but Handbrake is dropping support for .avi container and while it's still cross platform it is focusing very heavily on making encodes for Apple Mac, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone and so on, so this means mp4/m4v H264 and aac.

I wasn't satisfied with the quality produced even using 'mplayer' preset. There is really excessive blockiness, which tends to be a feature of MPEG-4 anyway, but in this case it is far too apparent.

So I've been exploring different mencoder options and making some comparisons.

Anyway I've found the culprit isn't bitrate (mostly), it's the fact that various extremely important codec options are not being used, namely mbd, v4mv, and trellis, while the unsharp filter is used but offers no clear benefit. After doing some tests and timing the encodes as well as looking at the output visually and comparing the numbers I can definitely say that adding mbd=2:v4mv:trell to the codec options adds to the encode time, but using the turbo option more than makes up for that, the total two pass encode time becomes shorter overall. The bitrate dictates the filesize so that remains unchanged. The huge difference is in the quality of the output. It is transformed and looks absolutely fantastic even with very challenging scenes.

Another change that would be beneficial would be to drop constant bitrate audio and use a lame vbr preset, either or The latter gives better quality than tablet-encode currently offers and has the benefit of a slightly smaller filesize. The 'medium' option would give a significant reduction in filesize while still offering very good quality.

The standard Nokia N810 media player works absolutely fine with these changes.

Here are the differences:

Tablet-encode audio:

Suggested audio:

Tablet-encode video options:

Suggested video options:

The options vrc_buf_size=450:vrc_minrate=0:vrc_maxrate=1000 would seem to be redundant when using lavc as it accepts the specified bitrate as a maximum anyway, and intelligently uses less if the specified rate is not required. The turbo option significantly speeds up the first pass, by over 40% sometimes, and it's fine to leave the option in on the second pass when it will be ignored, no harm done.

In summary I've found that with these changes to the video options and even using lame's preset=standard I get a slightly faster encode and slightly smaller filesize (though both these will vary from file to file) but a huge increase in quality, very noticeable even on the small N810 display. I can't find a downside.