Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

First, an update. A week ago, I got my hands on a Motorola v710 (Laurie's company got one and I get to use it). Radio Shack had made them available before they were available at Verizon stores. This was good, as it ws highly anticipated both by me and many, many others. After all, it has bluetooth, a memory card slow, and a nice screen. It was also advertised as being an "mp3 player."

In any case, it has the same video capabilities as the LG VX7000. That is to say, if you convert high quality video directly into 3GPP or 3GPP2 format it looks _really_ good on the handsets.

Now, we have some clips that look excellent on these phones from when Laurie was in South Africa. However, the use of those is far different from, say, putting a movie, TV show, or short clip on the phones.

We have a lot of anime, so I wanted to take some of the episodes, convert them into 3GP, and place them on the phone (which will be easy once the TransFlash card arrives).

I started out with not trying to directly rip the pieces of the DVD because last time I'd tried that with anime I'd inevitably get the wrong tracks of video with the wrong tracks of audio and the result would be a useless file and a couple hour of wasted time. Instead, I started out with DVD player out put to DV camera input to 1394 output on DV cam to 1394 input on computer. Well, this first attempt at that was with Windows Movie Maker and it insisted on starting the tape playing instead of just recording the 1394 video stream.

My second thought was then to directly record onto the DV tape. Easy, I thought. So, I pressed the record button. The DV cam promptly flashed "record inhibit." Doh! It's smart!

My third thought was to go ahead and try my old Archos Multimedia 20 (not even the 100 series). This recorded the video and audio fine. Unfortunately, the resulting file was already of fairly low quality (although fine on the device itself) and it was not in a format that QuickTime Pro would read. This mean using another utility to convert to 3GP and the resulting output had numerous issues including loss of correct contrast and brightness that could be barely corrected by the phone adjustments. The quality was also low because of the double low resolution conversion.

This is when I went back to the idea of ripping it directly from DVD onto the computer. I did this and got a nice output. Unfortunately, the only format of any sort of quality was DIVX and this, sadly, can't be read by QuickTime Pro for conversion. The other utility also could not read it, but the rip was also a single file of 4 episodes and this tool didn't have the cutting ability of QuickTime Pro anyway. Doh!

So then I found a utility that would record the raw DV cam stream onto the computer (a 32K byte utility, no less -- very useful). This is when I learned that the video camera doesn't take input from the mic unless it's recording to tape. Doh!

So then I thought, maybe I'll use my Apex DVD player that de-macrovisions. I got it all hooked up and it started recording to tape fine! Unfortunately, there still wasn't any audio. The audio output levels didn't work with the input on the video camera. Doh!

Finally, an idea came to me when I was looking through some conversion utilities. Why not rip the DVD into DV format? That will keep all possible quality as DV format is higher quality than DVD. That is also very usable by QuickTime Pro; remember our first videos were converted from DV. The only drawback to this method is that a 2 hour movie will take nearly 28 gigabytes of temporary storage. However, after testing a 30 second clip, this method works perfectly well, is fairly fast (on an old machine), and is relatively easy.

Yay!

Now I just have to figure out what audio format works the best. The phone supports MP3, although I don't know if it does within the video files. The video runs at 192 kilobit. The default audio is around 14 kilobit, which is tuned for speech. It sounds quite good, although it artifacts with music and such. MP3, even at 64 kilobit, will take up a substantial amount of storage.

Hmm.. have to run some tests. I'm ripping the audio at 192 kilobit PCM, so there is virtually no loss there. It does get dropped down to stereo, but the phone is essentially a mono device, so that doesn't matter. Perhaps mono MP3 at 32kilobit would be good enough?

Ah, the fun of it all... ;)

Posted by Shane on August 6, 2004 7:32 AM | Permalink