[General Topics] Menneisyys:
1.1.1.2 You’ll be forced for (slow!!) recoding – unlike with ASP

First and foremost, as can also be clearly seen based on my very thorough tests, you in no way can play your familiar, “torrented”, full PAL/NTSC-resolution video clips / movies on current hardware. This is diametrically opposed to the case of ASP, where you, in most cases (except for the slowest TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile devices), can.

This means you MUST recode your videos before watching. You can’t just quickly drop your fresh-torrented, PAL/NTSC full-resolution (720*480 or 576) AVC’s on a memory card and just use CorePlayer (or TCPMP) to watch them. When they become available, that is; currently, on the Torrent scene, mostly, “only” HD (720p / 1080p / 1080i) videos are encoded in AVC, traditional, “low-res” PAL/NTSC rips are (still) all ASP’s.

Not even the best, most powerful handheld devices are able to play full PAL/NTSC-resolution videos (let alone 720p / 1080p / 1080i ones!). You must recode everything to either the native screen width of your device (which, again, isn’t the case with traditional ASP videos) or less and, in cases (for example, with VGA devices and/or slow (200 MHz) TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile handsets), you must deactivate some of the advanced features. This, again, isn't the case with "traditional" ASP files.

As noone not having a mobile device him or herself will deliberately rescale his videos (primarily meant for desktop watching) to a 640 or, God forbid, 320-wide one and, probably, even remove some features, which results in a visible quality decrease. With ASP files, you can just watch files originally meant for desktops on a handset; with AVC files, you can’t.

In addition, recoding, as opposed to creating ASP files, is a time-consuming process. In general, creating an AVC video takes 2-3 times longer than doing the same with an ASP one.

1.1.2 Pros

If you MUST use the least possible video sizes (because, for example, you don’t have an SDHC-enabled handset) with the best possible quality, H.264 is the way to go. It’s simply unbeatable and is way better than ASP at the same (low) bit speed. Again, it’s like how HE-AAC v2 compares to MP3.

Also, the MP4 container format used by the recommended Nero Recode makes it possible to have two (!) sound tracks in the same file. This was very hard to achieve with AVI files without some manual work. To my knowledge, there aren’t any Windows Mobile (Symbian, Palm etc.) related tools that let for storing two sound tracks in an AVI file. (It’s, technically, not impossible.)

Finally, once you learn how to navigate around in Nero Recode, ripping DVD’s or converting your other videos becomes very easy. No command-line tools are necessary – albeit, of course, you can use them too. For free, I should add – the most important command-line tool to encode into AVC, x264, is highly recommended and is of high quality. It, however, takes a while to learn – this is why I tend to recommend Nero Recode instead.

Nero Recode is, at first, seems to be a bit more complicated to use than well-known, established Windows Mobile DVD / video conversion tools like Pocket DVD Studio, Pocket DVD Wizard etc. Also, it’s a lot more expensive (around US$ 90). However, taken into account that several other AVC encoders are more than five times more expensive and you also get a complete suite of for example CD / DVD burners, the price can be justified. And, again, it only takes, say, an hour to completely learn to master the tool - unlike with x264.

(Note that, as the aim of this Bible is NOT showing you all the necessary encoding tools and tricks, I "only" discuss Nero Recode. It's readily available for download as a pretty much usable trial, isn't much overpriced and is MUCH easier to use than free tools. It's particularly because of the latter that I've chosen it to be featured in this Bible. Should you need another tool, look around HERE. I particularly recommend the decoder comparisons linked from HERE.)

1.1.2.1 Sample videos

In order to show you how much better AVC videos are than plain ASP ones, I've uploaded several of my test videos for you to evaluate. They're all 29-second, bilingual (English & German) and with two subtitle streams (English & German) and have been encoded for best quality (two-pass encoding with the best quality defaults).

In order to play them, you'll most probably need an AVC-compliant video player (if you don't already have a H.264 decoder on your system; for example, Cyberlink's newer PowerDVD versions do have a pretty good one - albeit in no way as efficient as CoreAVC, which I'll talk later. To play back these videos, it's more than sufficient). The easiest is getting VideoLAN VLC. Just download & install it (no need to fuss around with separate codecs - it contains all), start and open the video files.

320*144 videos:

87 kbps:

ASP (the worst - at 87 kbps and 320*144, using traditional ASP produces pretty bad results). As with the other bitrates & resolutions, this file is called "ASP.mp4".

AVC with all AVC goodies enabled - now, compare the quality of this title to the above-linked ASP one. Quite different, isn't it? Yes, AVC is WAY better at really low bitspeeds like 87 kbps. The file is named "default.mp4" - as will be the case with other bitrates.

AVC without bilinear prediction / CABAC support: this video has been encoded without two major AVC features to heavily reduce the load at runtime (and help speed up playback). (Note that I'll speak of bilinear prediction / CABAC later.) Nevertheless, even without these features, it's way better than ASP.

The same videos, encoded at 273 kbps and 320*144. As can clearly be seen, ASP produces much better results at this speed than at 87 kbps; still, AVC still has the lead, even without bilinear prediction / CABAC.

Sample videos encoded at three different bitrates (204k, 366k and 464 kbps) and at 640*272. Note that, with the second group, I've also made available two other videos. THIS one demonstrates the video quality degradation with bilinear prediction disabled; THIS with CABAC disabled. (Again, the 363k group also has the video that shows the "combined" effect of disabling both features - it's, again, named "nobilinNoCabac.mp4").

I really recommend scrutinizing these videos. For example, in the next scene at second 13 into the sample movie:

it's really worth checking out the following:

- the wall (it'll be "moving" all the time, producing a very bad effect, particularly with ASP and/or deblocking disabled)

- the effective resolution of the balls on the pool board (it'll be decidedly lower with 320-wide ASP videos than AVC ones, showing ASP not only sacrifies at quality (blockiness), but also at resolution at such low bitrates)

- the "blockiness" of the green pool board around the balls.

As you'll see, ALL these test videos show how much better AVC is, image quality-wise.

Now that you’ve seen both the advantages and disadvantages of AVC, let’s take a look at what players there are to play them.