Notices

Okay, for this particular clip I couldn't have been more wrong. Off the top of my head here's a first stab at a crazy person's explanation:

This is a very high quality computer generated animation for children. All motion and lighting are highly syncopated with smooth accelerations. Almost like a ballet. It's eye candy, not an eye sore. This ain't the "The Blair Witch Project." This kind of stuff is probably a codec's dream. Most of the movements, large and small, seem to be low-order polynomials of shapes of low-order.

I have so much to do, but this high quality footage makes me want to find out where that demon lives.

After some more tests, i finally obtained this setting as the best :
Encoding with HandBrake (mac os) gives a lot less mosaic,
576x352 (slightly cropped on both sides), MP4, 750 Kbps
MP3 44.1 KHz, 128 Kbps

I then get very nice fullscreen and detailed playback.

Qole, thankyou for suggesting 576 instead of 640 ... it was for testing, but finally, it seems to work better than 640 ...

Daperl, what you suggest is very interesting, i suppose a real movie, and even more a "dirty" one would give more compression artefacts, not necessarily a less good performance, what do you think ?

I will try to make another test with a real movie.

Well, final test, I tried with a real movie.
Just converted a chapter of a DVD with Handbrake. I chose a movie with some grainy pictures (Happy Together - Wong Kar Waï). Same settings than before, 576x352 was perfectly fitting the movie without any cropping.
And the result is ...
...
...
Very good !
Not jerky, not blocky ... just nice !

Frankly 576x352 is a loooooot better than 400x240.

Can somebody try and confirm these findings ?

That is very interesting. I would much rather encode for 576x352 if our tablets can handle it. I wonder if the fact that I've been encoding XviD instead of MP4 has anything to do with it?

Maybe ... I noticed that AVI MP4 seems to work better than other filetypes ... don't know why !

Now i'm very pleased by the video ability of the N810 ... it's better than iPod touch !

NIT ROCKS !

I think it's as simple as, "garbage in, garbage out." But animators control every pixel. No need for any blurry image stabilization software. What's funny, is after the first seen, where there aren't any animals, there's no more weather for the rest of the clip. No wind, no clouds and no real contrast. I'm not sure there's one black pixel. When something shakes, everything shakes. Other than that, the backdrop doesn't budge. There's same mild dust when the tree trunk starts rolling, but it's so fine that it's more like haze. They're very stingy with their moving pixels. And the mammoths are easy 'cause they move so slow.

Daperl, I think you are too much negative.
Ice Age 3 is supposed to be a fun movie, and the trailer lets hope it really is. It's not supposed to be a show of technical prowess.

Regarding of its ability to be compressed in higher resolution than expected, its nature of 3D movie doesn't change anything, it works the same on our tablets with a real movie too.

I'm happy that we can finally have better video support, because the "official" guidelines doesn't provide a very good quality.

Aren't you happy too ?

I'm not negative; I'm fascinated. Yes, I'm happy. Thanks for starting this thread.

You are welcome.

I learnt so much in this forum to help me use my tablet, I would be happy to share any usefull information too !

I made some extensive testing at home these 2 last days.

Here are the resolutions that worked well for me, depending the source video format (ratio and framerate)

For sources at 24 or 25 fps (24 is cinema, 25 is PAL video)

16:9 > 576 x 352
Wide > 640 x 272
4:3 > not tested


For sources at 30 fps (NTSC video)

16:9 > 480 x 288
Wide > 576 x 240
4:3 > 400 x 304

Encodings with Handbrake, from various DVD i have.
File were encoded to AVI with MP4 video
2 passes can be used, but bitrate should be kept as low as possible, around 600 to 750 kbps for video
(I prefer to keep single pass, because 2 passes will sometimes exceed the maximum bandwith ang give somewhat choppy video in full screen high speed action).
All audio was 44.1 MP3 128 Kbps