DivX on Android? (Spica)

[JaceMan]

youtube hq and youtube hd are different, and you can't play youtube hd on g1. youtube hq is the same spatial resolution as normal youtube but with less compression, its not any larger in a spatial respect like youtube hd is.

I don't believe that is correct. Not all videos on YouTube are available in HQ. Standard definition on YouTube is 320x240 which the YouTube player scales up to 480x360 in the browswer window which makes the video quality degraded. When playing a video that is capable of being displayed in HQ it displays natively at 480x360 without scaling. 480x360 is higher resolution than the G1's native 320x480.

[coina]

touche.

where does the frame size limitation of the g1 video player come in then jaceman? because one defintely exists.

[JaceMan]

If there is a specific limitation (resolution and not processing power) I don't know what it is. My educated guess would be that if YouTube HQ (480x360) doesn't match the G1's limits, the next logical stop would be 640x480 VGA playback limitation. But as the G1's native resolution is only 320x480, I wouldn't bother encoding anything at a higher resolution than 480 (width) as you really wouldn't gain anything except larger file size.

If the question is: what to encode at? Then it would be foolish to go beyond 480x360 as it would be a waste. If the question is: will it play this video I downloaded? I'd have to answer with: 'Try it and see.'

[extorian]

Just my 2p worth here...

A few months ago I was reading a T-Mobile G1 transcoding thread I'd stumbled upon, while Googling something else Android related, which just caught my attention briefly. They were discussing the command-line parameters to pass to some transcoding software on Linux to transcode AVIs into a suitable format for playback on a G1.

The outcome boiled down to two formats:

427 x 320 x 30fps (or fps of original if less) for 4:3 content.
480 x 270 x 30fps (or fps of original if less) for 16:9 content.

In both cases, as JaceMan pointed out, you're not going above the G1's native resolution (which would be pointless).

It's also worth noting that the G1 can play HQ YouTube videos very well. The lowest HQ YouTube quality (of which there are 3 types), uses MPEG4, which is essentially what DivX is. So I would assume the overhead of DivX decoding would be similar.

However, I do not know which of the HQ formats the G1 chooses to use. The higher quality of the three HQ formats YouTube uses is FLV - which could be anything wrapped in Flash - I've not bothered to check.