[Advantage X7500, MDA Ameo General] mackaby007:
That's right, blissful viewing on your VGA Athena. How?

Don't expect to run it in a full screen window, that's how. The CPU (powerful as it is) cannot handle native VGA 640x480 full screen encodes. Probably due to the many other things it has to do simultaneously.

For full screen 640x480, we need the ATI Imageon chip acceleration support, which as we all know is not yet available and ATI/AMD have not been forthcoming in helping CoreCodec in revealing the nature of their hard/software embedded implementation. Nuff said.

320x240 resolution with extremely high bitrates won't give you the sharpness a QVGA device can playing the same resolution.

On the Hermes with the ATI chip, they finally got a resolution/fix as there seemed to be some buffering issues regarding Audio (not entirely sure if these reports were accurate), so I've been playing with Audio codecs and lower bit-rates, to some benefit....but not enough.

The best 'in-between' results I have found till we get a fix for our Imageon hardware (if ever) is as follows.

P.S. I've tried playing with H264, X264, DivX 6.xxupwards, Mpeg 4 etc and various encoders from Virtual Dub and Guardian ... to DVDx and too many to mention to be honest (over 20-30 encoders over the last few years).

For movie clips or entire movies to look really good on a VGA screen IMHO and experience, you have to encode higher than QVGA but less than VGA unless like the Dell's you have a accelerator that actually work with TCPMP or Coreplayer. Our only works with the ATI software renderer, which is still miles better than any other option open to us.

So I now encode at:

Video: 480x320 at 850kbps

Audio: AAC @ 44100hz and 128kbps (if music video)

Audio:AAC @ 22050hz and 64kbps (for everything else)

I can only yield benchmark results of around 118% :( but

I've successfully played over 72500 frames with only 45 frames dropped!:)

Trust me..that is really good. 0 frames would be nice and very possible by encoding at 320x240 but the video looks to soft whereas at 480x320 it actually looks quite sharp indeed.

If you encode a genuine High def clip or movie at this resolution, the end result will look like the original HD clip or worst way, like a super-bit DVD.

1% frame 'droppage' = 725

45 frames dropped out of 72500 = less than 1/16th of 1% which = Bliss :)

You do the maths.

Depending on the source video, if it is full screen, so will the encoded video, but if it is in wide screen format, so will your encodes be.

For DVD conversion I got best results vs speed using (freeware) Handbrake v2.25 and Mpeg 4 decoder.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

For individual files (VOB files), I use Any Video Converter (yeah, that's the name of the application). Same results.

For all other video files I love Smartmovie with the same setup as outlined above, except for the encoder..I use Xvid in Smartmovie.

I'll try to upload a sample video to rapidshare or something if anyone wants to view the quality and performance...but my time is somewhat limited at the moment.

P.S. The above mentioned apps are dummy proof and not too complex for noobs, so why not try it out and let us know how you get on.

Last but not least, in Coreplayer v1.1.1 or even TCPMP , if you suffer from lipsync problems, try adjusting

Menu/Tools/Preferences/Select Page/Advanced...scroll down and adjust the 'Manual A/V offset'. Mine is currently at:

-0.200 but depending on other videos I might have to adjust to -0.600...it works wonderfully (menu navigation in TCPMP might be slightly different to Coreplayer, but the option is still there).

Good luck and if you have better results than these, please post back and share your findings. Thanks