[Vega General] kenfisher:
Try this from modaco.

Afternoon all

As mentioned in a few threads, I've been tinkering with encoding settings in Handbrake in order to get the optimal settings for converting video. After spending a few hours with this last night and this morning - what a fun Friday night, huh? - I think I have nailed it. This profile will allow you to watch files using the native video player - you don't need anything like RockPlayer, or VPlayer. This means that they should be hardware accelerated. You can use something like RockPlayer, but framerates will suffer if you're using HD videos. I tested this using the 1080p MP4 version of Big Buck Bunny as the input file and it works very well - I'm going to give this a shot on some of my other videos today.

I have attached the profile in question.

EDIT: Rename the file to "Vega.plist" before importing (take off the .txt extension) - I've only just realised that modaco will not let me upload PLIST files...

Don't try to double click this, as it might try to open in Quicktime - no idea what it will do on a Mac! To import it open Handbrake, go to "Presets" and click "Import". The profile export feature is experimental, so I'll list the detailed settings that I used in case it does not work.

Firstly though, if you're not sure what you're doing in the "Picture" tab, have a read of this quick primer on Anamorphic video. If you want to scale down a 720p or 1080p video to match the Vega's resolution, set Anamorphic to loose, modulus to 16, and set the video width to 1024. For any videos that are not HD, or if you're not sure, just set this to "Strict": this will make sure that the video always displays in the correct aspect ratio, but you won't be able to scale the video down. Don't mess with the "Cropping" settings unless you know what you're doing.

I'd highly recommend scaling 720p or 1080p HD videos down to match the Vega's resolution - it drastically reduces the output size:

The original version of Big Buck Bunny (1920*1080): 885MB

Strict anamorphic - no scaling (1920*1080): 388MB

Scaled down to 1024*576 with loose anamorphic: 128MB

The Vega will play 720 or 1080 files, but you won't see that extra detail so there's no point in wasting the extra space on your SD card, IMO.

Detailed settings - in case the attachment fails. If anyone finds any optimisations for this, please let me know!

Output Settings:

Container: MP4 File

Large file size: Unchecked

Web optimised: Unchecked

iPod 5G support: Checked

Video Filters Tab:

Detelecine: Default

Decomb: Default

Deinterlace: Off

Denoise: Off

Deblock: Off

Grayscale Encoding: Off (Unchecked)

Video Tab:

Video Codec: H.264 (x264)

Framerate: Same as source

Quality: Constant Quality, set slider to RF:20

Audio Tab:

This is going to vary, depending on the audio tracks in the source video (for example, a DVD may have multiple languages and each of these will be a different audio track) - I have not yet tested multiple audio channels on the Vega, so I highly recommend only adding one audio track to your output file. The following drop-downs must be set:

Audio Codec: AAC (faac)

Mixdown: Stereo (no point having multi-channel audio if you can't play it on the Vega)

Samplerate: Auto

Bitrate: 160

Subtitles:

This will depend entirely on whether you want to include the subtitles from the source video. This can get a bit more complicated, so I'm not going to cover it here; if your source has subtitles as a separate track (i.e., soft subs not hard subs), you may need to take some extra steps - do some research on this over at afterdawn.com or doom9.org.

Chapters:

If your source video has chapters - like a DVD - you can replicate those chapters in the output video; if there are no chapter markers in the source, the checkbox is greyed out.

Advanced:

There's quite a lot in here, so bear with me...

Reference Frames: Default (3)

Maximum B-Frames: Default (3)

CABAC Entropy Encoding: Checked

8x8 Transform: Checked

Weighted P-Frames: Unchecked

Pyramidal B-Frames: Default (Normal)

No DCT-Decimate: Unchecked

Adaptive B-Frames: Optimal

Adaptive Direct Mode: Default (Spatial)

Motion Estimation Method: Default (Hexagon)

Subpixel ME & Mode Decision: Default (7)

Adaptive Quantisation Strength: slider set to middle

Psychovisual Rate Distortion: slider set to middle

Psychovisual Trellis: slider set fully to the left

Partition Type: Default

Trellis: Default

Deblocking: Both drop-downs set to Default (0)

For those that are interested in the more nerdy side, I started off by copying Handbrake's built in "High Profile" x264 settings. I found this page, which mentions that the Xoom only supports the baseline x264 profile, so I turned off the advanced x264 stuff. However I realised that even though the hardware is the same, the Xoom is not the Vega. So started re-enabling the advanced options one by one to see if any caused a problem. The only one I found that caused any issue was weighted P-Frames, which seemed to make videos judder slightly.

Attached File(s)

Vega.plist.txt (3.52K)

Number of downloads: 521

This post has been edited by blcollier: 26 March 2011 - 01:44 PM