Help needed in getting a film onto PMP

[Mithrandir]

I treated myself to a Genus Vizo Portable media Player (PMP) but have not been able to find an easy/quick to use tool (preferably freeware) to convert a movie from one of my DVDs to a compatable format (avi/DivX/mpeg2)

I have tried a few short clips I've gotten holdof from the Internet previously (trailers) and a couple have worked but others just freeze.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

mithrandir

[Funkstar]

http://www.doom9.org

pretty much everything you need wil be on there somewhere, if not in the guides, then on the forums.

If you just need MPEG-4 (Divx or Xvid) have a look at AutoGK. I'm using this to archive off my whole DVD collection for when i get an Archos AV500. Very easy to use software, especially compaired to doing each stage manually.

Something to remember about PMP devices and MPEG-4 set top players is that they hardly ever support the advanced features. AutoGK has options to make it's videos compliant to either the MTK/Sigma or ESS chipsets.

[Mithrandir]

Thanks Funkstar.

I've been looking around and was on the videohelp site.

How long should a standard movie (say 2 hours) take to convert to mpeg4/Divx/Avi format?

Many thanks

[Funkstar]

All depends on your processor (yours will be quite slow for this going by your sig). On my Athlon 2200, depending on the film, it takes between 1x and 1.5x the play length to encode. Thats everything including demuxing, MP3 audio, resizing and encoding to Xvid.

It will be significantly faster if you scale the video down to the native resolution on the Viso.

[Mithrandir]

Yup using the AMD 900mh to test out my first conversion - a big mistake! I'm using Auto Gordian Knot and I've been encoding a 99gb VOB since 2:30pm this afternoon, it's now almost 7pm and that's for a reduced size (1/3 CD).
It's on the 2nd pass at the moment so I'm guessing it'll be done soon.

I'm not too sure what the native resolution is for this unit, I'm guessing 320x240. I've sent an email to Genusdigital to find out.

I should have used my other machine and judging by your answer should be much quicker!
It's a Winchester 3200+ with 1gb Dual channel RAM.

In the meantime, I've scoured through some older PC mags and PCW had an article about watching videos on PDAs. They mentioned a free program that encodes DivX - see HERE
Gonna see what this is like (the screenshot shows Archos handheld units so might be suitable) just need to find out what resolution this screen is.

File should also be compatible since the Vizo supports DivX

[Funkstar]

i've been encoding all mine with Xvid (i like that it is open source with no nags/reduced features until you buy it) using the quality based setting, I'm not really concerened about the file size. 75% quality is pretty good, depending on the source material and length, a film usually ends up between 1.2 and 1.6gig.

AutoGK uses standard tools that are geared towards quality rather than speed, others will be the other way around. depends what you are looking for i guess.

BTW, did you mean a 9.9gig VOB or are you really compressing a 99gig VOB?

[Mithrandir]

BTW, did you mean a 9.9gig VOB or are you really compressing a 99gig VOB?



haha!

No sorry I meant 0.99gb

The Divx.ppccool app seems very good. Quick encoding and quality is reasonable for the Genus Vizo. I think I'll play around with this one and see if I can get better quality.

Thanks

[Funkstar]

Whatever works best for you