XVid Codec for Series 60 / UIQ mobile devices

[Marcel]

As usual, I've been floating around looking for the best solution for video playback on my Nokia 3650.
What I found was Lonely Cat Games (http://www.lonelycatgames.com/), who offer an Encoder GUI / Player combo called SmartMovie (http://www.lonelycatgames.com/mobile/smartmovie/smartmovie.html). Well, this seems to be just a 2cent GUI to XVid and MP3. More astonishing is that they use XVid as Video Codec! They even offer a complied version of it for download (http://www.lonelycatgames.com/mobile/smartmovie/smartmovie.html#downloads)! I've been really surprised.
Has anyone ever heard of a Series 60 / UIQ build of XVid? I'm especially interested in it's limits. I had a look at xvid.org and google.com, but I didn't find anything.
The player is very impressive, as it offers AVI playback in a 90° rotated full screen way (the display resolution is 176*208 pixels), though it fails on playback of a 80k Xvid/24k MP3 25FPS 208*160 clip.

[DarkDudae]

It doesn´t support high resolutions because s60 mobile devices resolution is just 208x176.

About its limits... well, you can´t use high bitrates, and if you use bframes 2, there is lag in playback. Anyways, is the best solution for video playback in s60 devices. I have not tested with GMC or Qpel, but I suppose that the mobile´s ARM CPU(105Mhz) can´t decode that very well.

Greetings

[Marcel]

I've made some tests and found the following:
A 208x112 clip (Indigen (http://indigen.free.fr)) plays fine, if Audio Preload is set to 0 ms and interleaving is set to every 25 frames. Tested with those parameters:

video: 160 kBit/s, B-Frames/QPel/GMC off
audio: 16 kHz, 16 kBit/s MP3

As soon as B-Frames (1/1.5/1.0) or GMC were activated, the playback stuttered in action scenes.
An audio preload caused the player to delay the audio for exact the preload value.
An audio sampling rate of 22.050 Hz causes a out-of-cpu-power-playback, starting with slow and delayed video, ending with stuttering audio.

Now I'm waiting for a free Series 60 AVI player. XVid is already here.

[symonjfox]

Well, I haven't tried it yet, but I have a 7650 (so it just have 4 MB internal and no expansion card).

I was able to put a small Xvid Clip (simple profile and low res) into MP4 container and play it back using a tool I downloaded (for making video MMS). It had no audio, but played back fine.

Another player, is able to play 3gp files, that can use Xvid as video file, but there is no muxer avaiable yet. AMR audio is the only one supported.

[bond]

Originally posted by symonjfox
Another player, is able to play 3gp files, that can use Xvid as video file, but there is no muxer avaiable yet. AMR audio is the only one supported.quicktime is able to mux .3gp files, maybe also mp4box from gpac

[symonjfox]

Ok, Thank you for the input :D

I'll check it soon.

PS: does it work also with AMR audio or not?

[bond]

dunno about quicktime, but mp4box can only mux amr if it is inside 3gp/mp4/mov already

btw also ffmpeg is able to create (mux?) 3gp files, it even includes an amr and h.263 encoder!

[symonjfox]

I played around this tool, and I found 2 or 3 things I don't like:

1- It doesn't accept AVS files as input. I hope they will support it ASAP. The easyest workaround is saving a temporal AVI using a lossless codec (like LOCO VVF1 or other).
2- When you want to perform a 2 pass encode, you must turn off the audio for the first pass or you'll lose time encoding twice the audio.
3- There isn't a direct DVD 2 mobile AVI option. You can off course open a vob file but sometimes it crashes (maybe it doesn't like the 5.1 audio).
4- Mobile software skip any B frames. I made a small test and played stutter, but just because it skip b frames (the encode was very low bitrate and very low res o there isn't any CPU overload).

5- Is your battery charged enought to play a full 120 min movie? I don't think so. At least my 7650 can't.

I really hope that this program will be extended with these other things. And also extended to MP4 or MKV container.

Using normal 3gp files, I haven't find any that support landscape screen or mp3 (or aac audio). I think that mp3 is better than AMR (listening to the phone speaker), and I hope that MP4 - AAC will be supported too.