Ideal Video Format?

[GortToo]

All twenty pages

I have spent the last several days trying to master transfering a dvd to my droid. I have downloaded several programs, handbrake, Super, etc. Nothing seemed to work and I was starting to doubt my ability to do it. Then I saw a post saying that dvd catalyst had worked for them. So I tried it and viloa, on my first try I got excellent video on the Droid.

What I learned, 1. The dvd I started with turned out to be a problematic dvd. So if you are a newbie like me and aren't succeeding, try another dvd. 2. Try dvd Catalyst. I don't really know if their software is better than the others, but their instruction manual is far better than any others I encountered. If you are new to this, they make it simple.

After I succeeded a few times I went back to my problematic dvd. I downloaded anyDVD, ran my troublesome dvd through it and then Catalyst and voila, it worked.

 

[infodude]

I posted a request for assistance in a new thread and should have posted here. Sethmo's Super(c) settings (pg 4) worked for me in converting Kodak Zi8 files. I'll soon be testing to see if I can get files to render in H.264 as opposed to MPEG-4, as support for such has been added in the latest version of Super(c) Lots of good advice here and I'm just left wondering why some settings work for some folks and not others.

ID

 

[dvdcatalyst]

I'm just left wondering why some settings work for some folks and not others.

H264 is a video format that has a lot of different options that affect compatibility with devices. Some devices work fine with some settings, while others work fine with others, but files created for one will not work on a different device. The Droid can play iPod/iPhone formatted files, which should help.

 

[DroidNewbie12]

Little confused on screen size, format for the droid??

ok i have read thru this thread and many others, i think i have missed something but ill leave it up to you guys to set me straight.
i have handbrake 0.9.4 been attempting to transfer videos to the droid, to fill the droid screen. but in my attempts to change the resolution to 848x480 along with the other setting that you guys have posted here (THANKS by the way) i continue to get the resolution to 720 with the bars on the bottom and top, those ANNOY me!!! so what am i missing?? my video source are from standard DVDs, do they need to be bluray? thanks again for your guys help and constant postings

 

[dvdcatalyst]

ok i have read thru this thread and many others, i think i have missed something but ill leave it up to you guys to set me straight.
i have handbrake 0.9.4 been attempting to transfer videos to the droid, to fill the droid screen. but in my attempts to change the resolution to 848x480 along with the other setting that you guys have posted here (THANKS by the way) i continue to get the resolution to 720 with the bars on the bottom and top, those ANNOY me!!! so what am i missing?? my video source are from standard DVDs, do they need to be bluray? thanks again for your guys help and constant postings

PictureSettings ? HandBrake

Cropping ¶

Sometimes, movies have black lines on the sides. To get rid of the them, you crop the picture. HandBrake does this automatically. It chooses how to crop pretty well, but sometimes it doesn't catch everything. If this is the case, click the Custom cropping radio button. This will enable the 4 numerical fields below arranged in a T-shape. Each field controls the cropping for the corresponding side of the picture. The steppers increment by 2, because cropping works best with even numbers.

Or have a look here:


Detailed Black Bar Removal | Tools4Movies, the official home of DVD Catalyst

 

[valnar]

ok i have read thru this thread and many others, i think i have missed something but ill leave it up to you guys to set me straight.
i have handbrake 0.9.4 been attempting to transfer videos to the droid, to fill the droid screen. but in my attempts to change the resolution to 848x480 along with the other setting that you guys have posted here (THANKS by the way) i continue to get the resolution to 720 with the bars on the bottom and top, those ANNOY me!!! so what am i missing?? my video source are from standard DVDs, do they need to be bluray? thanks again for your guys help and constant postings

Yes, a DVD is only 720 wide. If you use ACT1, it will stretch the video upon playback. Now if the movie isn't the same AR as the Droid screen, you will of course get black bars on playback too (whether H or V).

Encoding movies to 848 is best left for HD formats, like Blu-ray.

 

[DroidNewbie12]

Thanks

Thanks for your quick response, i have tried it it appears i will have to live with the bars?? but do you think it would be due to the movies being on dvd rather than bluray? or am i barkin up the wrong tree?

 

[DroidNewbie12]

ok i have read thru this thread and many others, i think i have missed something but ill leave it up to you guys to set me straight.
i have handbrake 0.9.4 been attempting to transfer videos to the droid, to fill the droid screen. but in my attempts to change the resolution to 848x480 along with the other setting that you guys have posted here (THANKS by the way) i continue to get the resolution to 720 with the bars on the bottom and top, those ANNOY me!!! so what am i missing?? my video source are from standard DVDs, do they need to be bluray? thanks again for your guys help and constant postings

Yes, a DVD is only 720 wide. If you use ACT1, it will stretch the video upon playback. Now if the movie isn't the same AR as the Droid screen, you will of course get black bars on playback too (whether H or V).

Encoding movies to 848 is best left for HD formats, like Blu-ray.

Thanks valnar missed your response before i posted my previous one.

 

[dvdcatalyst]

Thanks for your quick response, i have tried it it appears i will have to live with the bars?? but do you think it would be due to the movies being on dvd rather than bluray? or am i barkin up the wrong tree?

You are barking up the right tree

The first thing is you need to remove the actual borders from the video. Supposedly Handbrake does this automatically, but I dont use it, so I am not sure if it does or not. Basically play the video on your computer (quicktime) and if there are no black bars, it did the job.

Second, when you play a video, the Droid will scale the video to either the full width or the full height. Your 720width will be scaled to 844 (actually 854) for a widescreen movie, or for a 4:3, it automatically scales the height to 480.
To make sure you do not end up with black bars, you have to perform some calculations.

Say your DVD video without the black borders is 720x360

When you play this on the Droid, it will be scaled from 720 to 854, so the height will be 854/720 x 360 = 428 or something close to that. this is less than the 480, so you end up with black bars of 26 pix in height on top and bottom.

So to get your cropping right, you will have to cut off something off the sides of the video (as explained in the article linked in my previous post)
start with the height 360, and find the scaling applied to it to make it full height
480/360= 1.3
Now multiply the width (720) with this to get the value of the width if it was scaled
720 x 1.3 = 936
since we want the width to be 854, we will have to cut off the sides, so 936 - 854 = 82
because we want the middle of the movie, we have to cut off 41 from each of the sides, but because the video is scaled by the player, you have to divide it by the scale factor. so 41 / 1.3= 30 (close)
So in your conversion tool, you have to enable the black bar removal so the actual black area is gone, and then adjust the crop width to re3semble the 30 width that needs to be substracted from each side.

Of course this differs per movie.

 

[jatgm]

i hope your people relize you can download an avi player from the marketplace for free on the droid... you people put too much thought into it.

 

[JhankG]

i hope your people relize you can download an avi player from the marketplace for free on the droid... you people put too much thought into it.

You're an idiot. Did you not see how old this thread is? Rockplayer wasn't available when thiswas started.

 

[dvdcatalyst]

Thank you for your input

i hope your people relize you can download an avi player from the marketplace for free on the droid... you people put too much thought into it.

I hope you realize you are reviving an old thread, in which its last post was dated before RockPlayer and vPlayer were available not counting the availability of VLC for Android next month.

But, while there are avi players out there, these files are not the "Ideal Video Format" (this thread's title) for Android devices. The Droid and just about all Android-based devices released since, have HARDWARE support for MP4 files.
While these other players can play a multitude of video files, including avi and MKV, when non-"ideal" video files are played, the processor is used more, resulting in either playback issues, lower quality (divx compression is not as good as H264) and usually higher battery-drainage when playing files.

 

[valnar]

HandBrake 0.95 is out!

The new HandBrake 0.95 is out. I have attached the Droid profile I created to use with it. Works great. (Keep width of a HD movie at 848, or 854 if you relax the block size.)

The two files in the ZIP archive are the same profile, so pick one depending on how you want to import the settings. The plist is for importing the profile within the HandBrake GUI. The XML file is if you want to copy it to the application folder (I prefer this option)

On XP, that would be:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\HandBrake\

For either preset, the only thing you should need to change is the Constant quality RF or the Bitrate depending on your quality or size needs. You may also want to make sure the file is saved as an MP4 with the .MP4 extension.

Enjoy!

 

[snowman]

valnar, thanks much i'll go and try to figure this all out and see if i can convert something , i appreciate it.

 

[bilallucky]

There are many different ways to get your movie or video converted over to a format that will work with he DROID but i used 848 (w) and left blank (h) (anamorphic set to “none”), video bitrate was kept at 1500, which may seem low but looks great on screen. This helps to keep the file size down. I have compressed a 15gb 1080p mkv file down to a 1.8gb m4v/mp4 file. The DROID does not do well with files over 2gb.