Lester Burnham
03-19-2005, 04:35 PM
I've recently bought one of those personal media players - kinda like an hard drive MP3 player, and then some.
It's not one of the main obvious ones, like Archos who are big in this field, it's a Goodmans GPDR40, but I don't think it's actually one of their products because it's the same unit as one sold by Mustek. The reason why I went with one of the more budget ones, being that I was just going to by a HD MP3 player (Philips HDD120 like my wife has), but this thing wasn't much more expensive, and has double the capacity.
Basically it's got a 40GB hard drive, a 3.6 colour screen (and quite a good screen, too). It will play videos, directly record video from composite and stereo input, plus it will output video to a TV. It plays MP3 and WMAs and another audio format that I forget at the moment. It also does slide shows / views for jpegs, and will print via direct printing. Plus it has an SD / MMC slot for removable media (to the device). And you don't have to go through some proprietary software to put your mp3s on - you can just copy as a mass storage device.
It's quite a nice bit of kit, really, especially for the price. The downsides being it's a little chunky, battery life isn't so great, and there's no remote.
Anyway, to the questions:-
1. As to playable video it just supports the one format on the device MPEG4 as ASF files - now I know little about anything but MPEG and DVD / VOB really, so much of this is still undiscovered territory. Video from other formats (basically MPEG or S/VCD) have to be converted on a PC using software supplied. The problem being this takes an _age_ to run.
What I'm mainly interested in, is taking a few DVD films, extracting the main film, and converting it to put on this device. I use DVDDecrypter to rip, and then use VideoReDo to save to elementary streams so I can convert the AC3 / DD audio to mpeg (mp2) audio - the software for the device doesn't seem happy dealing with AC3 soundtracks to mpeg files, so I convert using besweet once I've got elementary streams, then remux with the command line mplex1.
That's all good, and doesn't take that long, but the software supplied that then takes this mpeg and converts it to an mpeg4 ASF takes literally ages - I've had it converting the film Grosse Pointe Blank (from my DVD) and it's been running since sometime around 11pm last night, it's still running, now, at 16:30. Now I know my PC isn't exactly state of the art (Pentium III 1Ghz, 256M RAM), but even so...
So I'm after any suggestions as to any better / faster ways of doing this - ideally using freeware, 'cos I'm mainly a fan of freeware - of course excepting the excellent VideoReDo!
2. Video that I've already converted looks fine (at the moment just a couple of music videos, because of the extraordinary long runtimes of the conversion utility. The only problems I see are that during any movement, there seems some horizontal line artifacts - when there's not much movement, the picture quality looks very good, it's just when there's movement. Any suggestions for anything I can do to avoid this?
3. A bit of a question for Dan 'cos he seems to be pretty good at this sort of thing - what's the best way of increasing / normalising the volume of mp3s - there's some I'd just like a little louder, although I don't want them to distort or clip.
Not wholly connected to VideoReDo, I know - but I do use it as a step in the chain, and I know there's some experts here who probably know a lot more on these other formats.
Any help / advice appreciated.
It's not one of the main obvious ones, like Archos who are big in this field, it's a Goodmans GPDR40, but I don't think it's actually one of their products because it's the same unit as one sold by Mustek. The reason why I went with one of the more budget ones, being that I was just going to by a HD MP3 player (Philips HDD120 like my wife has), but this thing wasn't much more expensive, and has double the capacity.
Basically it's got a 40GB hard drive, a 3.6 colour screen (and quite a good screen, too). It will play videos, directly record video from composite and stereo input, plus it will output video to a TV. It plays MP3 and WMAs and another audio format that I forget at the moment. It also does slide shows / views for jpegs, and will print via direct printing. Plus it has an SD / MMC slot for removable media (to the device). And you don't have to go through some proprietary software to put your mp3s on - you can just copy as a mass storage device.
It's quite a nice bit of kit, really, especially for the price. The downsides being it's a little chunky, battery life isn't so great, and there's no remote.
Anyway, to the questions:-
1. As to playable video it just supports the one format on the device MPEG4 as ASF files - now I know little about anything but MPEG and DVD / VOB really, so much of this is still undiscovered territory. Video from other formats (basically MPEG or S/VCD) have to be converted on a PC using software supplied. The problem being this takes an _age_ to run.
What I'm mainly interested in, is taking a few DVD films, extracting the main film, and converting it to put on this device. I use DVDDecrypter to rip, and then use VideoReDo to save to elementary streams so I can convert the AC3 / DD audio to mpeg (mp2) audio - the software for the device doesn't seem happy dealing with AC3 soundtracks to mpeg files, so I convert using besweet once I've got elementary streams, then remux with the command line mplex1.
That's all good, and doesn't take that long, but the software supplied that then takes this mpeg and converts it to an mpeg4 ASF takes literally ages - I've had it converting the film Grosse Pointe Blank (from my DVD) and it's been running since sometime around 11pm last night, it's still running, now, at 16:30. Now I know my PC isn't exactly state of the art (Pentium III 1Ghz, 256M RAM), but even so...
So I'm after any suggestions as to any better / faster ways of doing this - ideally using freeware, 'cos I'm mainly a fan of freeware - of course excepting the excellent VideoReDo!
2. Video that I've already converted looks fine (at the moment just a couple of music videos, because of the extraordinary long runtimes of the conversion utility. The only problems I see are that during any movement, there seems some horizontal line artifacts - when there's not much movement, the picture quality looks very good, it's just when there's movement. Any suggestions for anything I can do to avoid this?
3. A bit of a question for Dan 'cos he seems to be pretty good at this sort of thing - what's the best way of increasing / normalising the volume of mp3s - there's some I'd just like a little louder, although I don't want them to distort or clip.
Not wholly connected to VideoReDo, I know - but I do use it as a step in the chain, and I know there's some experts here who probably know a lot more on these other formats.
Any help / advice appreciated.