Converting movies to G1 playable format

[MrGibbage]

I posted this in Off Topic because it will deal more with the PC software side f the house. I've never had a need to convert videos from DVD or from torrents to something that will play on device such as this. What software do you use to do these conversions? What specific settings do you use? Resolution, frame rate, codecs, anything else important? Anything that can be done to keep the file sizes down? What G1 specific settings need to be known?

[MartinMtz702]

I dont think we will have answers to this until someone tries it on their G1

[mixpix405]

I haven't memorized the specs for video playback on the G1, so Im not gonna go in too much detail about it, but a free program called mediacoder (link) is the best, imo, for easy, quick video transcoding.

A company called Videora (link) has programs that make video conversions specific to certain devices (i use their ipod converter, but they make one for xbox conversions, too). They don't have one for G1 yet, but I suspect they will soon.

[stopcrazypp]

I posted this in Off Topic because it will deal more with the PC software side f the house. I've never had a need to convert videos from DVD or from torrents to something that will play on device such as this. What software do you use to do these conversions? What specific settings do you use? Resolution, frame rate, codecs, anything else important? Anything that can be done to keep the file sizes down? What G1 specific settings need to be known?

Well Tmonews has a great sticky on this:
http://forums.tmonews.com/index.php?topic=3261.0

[rawskilz]

Well Tmonews has a great sticky on this:
http://forums.tmonews.com/index.php?topic=3261.0

looks reliable. thanks alot

[LordKurgan]

I don't think there is going to be a G1 format for video. Someone is just going to make a video player for the G1 that plays X format/s. Remember its been said many times already that it doesn't come with a video player besides youtube. You can download one off of the Market so it will play any format that someone makes an app for.

[MeMongo]

I know that VLC has transcoding capabilities:
http://wiki.videolan.org/Transcode

According to the tmonews article mentioned above, these are the specs to transcode to:

Output Container: mp4
Output Video Codec: MPEG-4
Output Audio Codec: AAC LC

Video Scale Size: 480:320
Aspect: 16:9
Frame/Sec: 15
Bitrate kbps: 384

Sample Freq: 22050
Channels: 2
Bitrate kbps: 64

We'll see how well this works next week.

[MrGibbage]

Having not even downloaded the softwares mentioned here, but I have looked over the web sites, it looks like these are for converting avi or asf or other media files. What about DVDs? Is that any different?

[Priz]

The nice thing about VideoLan is the player has all the codecs built-in (instead of you having to install a collection of codecs) and it's very portable. If someone were to make an Android version of VLC, you wouldn't need to convert movies, it would just play anything you threw at it. (Only reason you'd convert then is to optimize for space/screen resolution.)

One company using Android for a PMP device has posted in two different threads on the VLC forum offering hardware & money as incentive for someone to tackle a Android port of VLC.

[MeMongo]

Having not even downloaded the softwares mentioned here, but I have looked over the web sites, it looks like these are for converting avi or asf or other media files. What about DVDs? Is that any different?

VLC can theoretically stream DVDs to single files, but Handbrake can definitely do it (to MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM)
http://handbrake.fr/

To top it off, this originally Mac-only application is now available for Windows and Linux, and you should be able to put it into the correct frame rate and aspect ratio.