[Nook Color General] chisleu:
These are notes I made while making the "howto" which is in the first post. The final steps needed are above. If you are hacking your way through this stuff and looking for insights, the stuff below could be helpful.

If you are looking for "how do I do this fast" then don't read this stuff, just refer to the first post!!!

Watching video on CM7 (pre-hardware acceleration)

Rockplayer seems to work very well. I'm hoping to figure out the "ideal" formatting for software decode.

It seems everyone has their favorite way to pull this off... I'm using the free program "Handbrake" to convert video files over.

Well, I have reasonable quality video playing well but the sound is being a problem. With my last conversion, the sound will just stop playing after a while and you have to move the video slider around a little to get it to start back up. not good.

848x480 video seems to be pushing it and the quality isn't that much better than 720, so I'm going to limit myself to 720x480max video.

Sample rate 48 audio was very quiet, turns out 41 is too! Use the DRC slider in the audio tab -> 4 to help compensate. I also turned the volume on the speaker up 10db w/ thee "DSP Manager" that comes with the distribution. Helps to boost the volume to less silent levels. Workable, but headphones of some sort are still required IMHO.

Nope. Still crappy. Worried I won't be able to play anything past cartoons!

Update: Rockplayer sucks!!! (for me, on this platform, etc, etc)

http://moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html

At another's direction, the v7 "Neon" version of Moboplayer is EPIC. Works much better. It plays my encoding of "BBC Planet Earth - Jungles 1080p". On a side note, if you haven't seen the Planet Earth series, get it. It is super fun to watch. very interesting.

I used these settings:

720x400 (720 max w/ automatic height)

48k / 128kbps AAC/faac audio.

51 minutes is 765mb. Pretty huge.

I mostly used the direcitons provided here:

http://www.androidtablets.net/forum...using-handbrake-convert-video-nook-color.html

I'm currently converting "Back To The Future 720p":

720x400:

average bitrate 800kbps (2pass)

44.1/128 MP3(lame)

Remember to jack up the DRC (I've been using the max setting of 4) which will help compensate for the low speaker volume. I also configured the DSP EQ for up to 5db of boost (mid range) curving down to 1db at the extremities.

Damn I love this platform.

EDIT: Retried my 854x480 conversion (high bitrate, 1gig/51minutes) It plays just great with MoboPlayer Neon. I'm going to watch the low bitrate encode of Back To The Future 720p (720x400 ~800kbps video 766meg/1:56). It is transfering now but my firewall isn't N-capable so it's slow! :(

I'm mainly checking to see if that quality is decent (low bitrate and 2 pass encoding)

Then I'm going to do a "final settings" encode to test out max quality.

I'm also going to do a 1024x600 video just to see if it's possible to play. I think it's probably overkill. I think the playback will suffer. 854 seems to really eat CPU as it is. We will see.

EDIT: Downloaded a 1 minute 1080p test video to use to test resolutions/such with to speed things up a bit.

http://www.fileserve.com/file/SdtfFxh/hd_other_sony_hd_experiment.m2ts

EDIT: Droid does!!! DRC doesn't! Specifically, it doesn't boost volume very much. It is really just normalization. Not encoding using DRC anymore. If you want to watch videos... use headphones.

EDIT: Wow, much faster using a 1 minute file plus the math is easy to determine 1 hour file sizes. hehe.

EDIT: 1024 width doesn't play.

EDIT: Uhm, maybe it does. for some reason MoboPlayer is calling it HD and trying to play in hardware. I can play the 854 w/ software decode so I'm reencoding... stop deleting stuff even if it doesn't work the first time dude...

EDIT: so.... many... variables....

EDIT: door to door salespeople suck... no this isn't an ipad, and no I don't want your cleaning products.

EDIT: Got a quality configuration working! :)

My 1 minute test video ended up at 5,487KB which puts us at roughly 330MB per hour. Acceptable size for me. This is a 2-pass 600kbps video stream. The 500kbps had noticeably less quality. Higher quality encoding does improve quality, but seems to have video sync issues.

Encoding a lower resolution (but longer) file now w/ my settings to test.