For the past week since the new NIT Video Converter was released by Nokia Beta Labs, I've been doing my video conversions solely using this tool, and have discovered that the videos play back very well on the built-in Media Player

However, I have found that playback of the same video file in Canola 2 results in the picture being fit to height.

I have found that if I do the conversion using the N800 Video Convert software, I can specify encoding for Fit to Width, which plays back fine on both media players.

Perhaps someone from the NIT VC team could take a look at this, to offer an option to Fit to Width and not Height, seeing that most videos are in letterbox format anyway

Or the Canola team could look into offering an option for playback as Fit to Width instead of Height, since the videos turn out fine (i.e. letterbox) when played back on the Media Player

Hope this helps

Something I just noticed:

Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter converts videos to MP4 format, while the N800 Video Convert software keeps them in AVI/DivX/Xvid (?)

Perhaps there is a problem in how Canola/mPlayer handles MP4s because I am getting poor sound and audio (1-2 fps) when playing these files back through Canola.

I have actually not been able to play any videos converted with nokias software on anything other than the native media player app. any hints?

Which version are you using? The previous version of NITVC wasn't working well for me and I ended up using N800 Video Convert.

I need to test and find out if the MP4s created by NITVC will playback on an iPod Touch as well. If anyone can confirm this for me, it would be great.

The videos created by NITVC (I love that acronym written out like that -- NIT VC, thanks to whoever came up with that. It looks like a cool tattoo that a biker would have on his biceps or something ) are definitely optimized for playback only on the native media player. You'd need to ask the Canola guys about why/how their apps handles mp4 files differently.

As far as the "fit to height/width" option, that doesn't seem to be a bad idea. Could you enter an enhancement request on https://bugs.maemo.org about it? Provide as much detail as possible please about how you'd like to see this feature handled.

Whoa, hang on there.

Fact is, the MP4s created by NITVC are fine. I like the fact that it plays back on the Media Player. Canola has been running terribly slowly on my system recently, since I gave up booting from MMC. It's got a great UI, especially for showing off to friends and colleagues, but it's slow as treacle

And seriously, not having Fit to Width/Height is not a bug, it's more of a feature request since it doesn't exist today. Aside from this feature, I would also like to request for an option for audio normalization and 2-pass encoding

I have compared video outputs with 2-pass and have found it to be indeed better. Also, some of my movies have default audio levels so low that I have to crank up my PC speaker amps to properly listen to them. By normalizing the audio, I have found that it solves the audio problem completely.

My current settings are 2-pass encoding and 'audio normalization' set to 'on', and all my videos are set to 'Fit to Width' instead of Height, otherwise I end up watching a lot of skinny people on my tablet.

Nothing fancy, I would just start by adding these options as checkboxes in Settings:

( ) = radio buttons
[ ] = checkboxes

( ) Fit to Height
( ) Fit to Width
( ) Fit to Screen

[ ] Normalize Audio
[ ] 2-pass encoding

The way I see it (and I could be wrong here, if people chip in), is that people who like their video quality will always encode using 2-pass anyway, especially if they drag and drop and leave a whole bunch of files to encode overnight, and not many people vary their default settings at an individual file level when it comes to encoding.

I would also like to see a feature to set the output directory as a default folder and have the application automatically copy the converted files to this directory upon completion of each file (and not the whole batch). Copying is currently a manual process today.

This way, people can plug in their N800s and designate the SD card as the output directory, have their movies converted while they sleep, and it would just be a grab and go in the morning. The reason for files to be copied upon completion of each one instead of waiting for the whole batch to be completed, is to mitigate scenarios where the user runs out of storage space and the process halts before a single file is copied (Windows XP or Vista checks if the destination folder/drive has sufficient space before commencing the copy. By implementing 'copy on completion of each file', the user is assured that the storage card contains whatever it would hold, which would have been the intention of the automation anyway.

Hope this make sense. I would have filed this in Maemo.org, but the UI for bug submission is more cryptic and frustrating than having to fill out forms at government offices. Sorry

Also, if you happen to know the guys who are developing the media player, please let them know that it would be nice if they could include the following features:

1. Scan specific folders ONLY --- i like how Canola only scans specific folders instead of the whole card. Let's just say that I'm not looking forward to the day I add my 2nd 16GB SD full of music - it'll take hours to index all my music and videos

2. Display embedded album art.

I like Media Player because it's simple and fast, and it just works. Now that NITVC works well, I've switched from N800VC. If NITVC's MP4 files will playback on the iPod Touch, my wife will be one happy woman when I get back home in a couple of days.

Please, please submit enhancement requests into Bugzilla. I know the UI sucks if you're not used to it, but it's honestly the best way for us to keep track of ideas/suggestions and not lose them in the noise.

That's strange. Does anyone know why the iPod Touch won't play back this kind of MP4?

Done

Goes to show how much I hope to have these features implemented. Just for kicks, I converted a video with N800VC with audio normalized, Fit to Width and 2-pass encoding, and the output video is noticeably better in the action scenes and audio output is sufficiently loud at 75% volume, while the MP4 needed 100% to get a decent volume.