Video on the HTC Touch Pro2

[JRakes]

Crank up the stereo and set the PC in the corner. Make him listen until he decides to "play nicely." For added "encouragement," unplug his peripherals.

[jigwashere]

I went ahead and hunted down the copy of TCPMP I was using and checked use blitting instead of overlays in directdraw, so it works now, but it doesn't perform much better than divx mobile. It's a shame windows media player doesn't support such a common format as xvid, and I'm not likely to get back into re-encoding files for portable play unless I'm traveling.

In other news, I can sync/file transfer over the usb cable again. My desktop wasn't recognizing Syd via cable, but I wasn't sure if it was Syd's fault, or my desktop. I plugged into my netbook, where she was instantly recognized, and ever since, my desktop has decided to recognize her too (apparently refusing to be outdone by a netbook).

I should probably install TCPMP as a backup. It is one of my favorites. I'm pretty happy with my WinXP MCE + WMP10 setup right now. I still need to learn some of the ins and outs of WMP. One feature of TCPMP was that it remembered where you left off. WMP doesn't do that if you close the app.

I'm glad you got your USB connection working!

[CEB]

Well, hellooo!

I don't own a TP2 (yet), but I read this with interest (and confusion, as I'm not a video expert).

My TyTN II has TCPMP installed (I like that it remembers where it was in the video when you close it). I don't know how Core Player differs from TCPMP, but TCPMP is free I think. Maybe it's discontinued and the version I downloaded is an old hacked one.

Anyhow, I have the installation files in case I need to reinstall on my TyTN II, and if/when I get a TP2 I was going to try it on that too (I assume it would work there too). I also have files named "H264" and "TCPMP & Master Codec Pack 4 (WM6 Ultimate Edition)". I can't remember which I installed on my TyTN II but they might be useful at some point (wink wink).

I have a question for you experts who actually have a TP2: do the new TWiT videos play well on a TP2? My TyTN II isn't powerfull enough for even the 'low quality' version. If someone with wouldn't mind testing (preferably with TCPMP), I would be very gratefull please. An example is the "Download Video (Low)" here http://twit.tv/twit (direct download link, 205MB, http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp4/...40x368_256.mp4).

Thank you very much.

Colin.

[jigwashere]

I made this post in the 'jigwashere bought a TP2!', but feel it's more appropriate to follow up here:

I recoded the James Bond 'Casino Royale' and watched it on my TP2 last night. I used Handbrake's iPhone preset, but changed the resolution width to 640 (leaving the height blank). The picture looked beautiful, except that the sides were cut off in full screen view. I would've expected full screen view to show me the full video image with black borders on the top and/or bottom. What gives? I could find no setting to adjust this in HTC Album or Windows Media Player Mobile.

It's frustrating that HTC Album and WMP mobile don't allow for more control. I really miss TCPMP, so installed it on my TP2. It seems to work, but it doesn't take advantage of the hardware acceleration on the TP2 like WMP and Album. The handbrake settings I used above just don't work well at all in TCPMP.

Next experiment -- just pick iPhone preset in Handbrake, check 'Keep Aspect Ration', and go with that. The result? 'The Taking of Pelham 123' seems to work perfectly in WMP. No more cropping! I haven't watched the full movie, but so far so good. The same video in TCPMP is extremely choppy.

[jigwashere]

Okay, now. This is very strange. I can only get this to work right when I have the keyboard open. What the....?!? As long as the keyboard is open, I can do full screen with no cropping. I close the keyboard and all of a sudden I'm looking at a cropped, full-screen video.

[jigwashere]

I think I fixed it! I still need to do some more testing, but I'm watching the 'Phantom Menace' right now and it looks great.

In Handbrake, I set Anamorphic: Loose and set the Display size to 625x352. I also changed the cropping from Automatic to Custom and set all cropping to 0 (zero).

[jigwashere]

I've been posting at the Handbrake forums and doing a little experimenting. It appears that the TP2 can't handle anamorphic encoding. In North America, movies are stored on DVDs at 720 x 480. Handbrake offers anamorphic encoding to (ideally and optionally) stretch the video to fit the screen, fixing the distortion. While WMP on the TP2 can play video with anamorphic encoding, something gets buggered up in the process. The apparent proof is that to get something that looked decent, I had to change HB's automatic cropping and set it to zero. But even with cropping at zero, videos with anamorphic encoding were slightly distorted. In fact, I barely noticed it.

The best settings for the TP2 in Handbrake use the iPhone default, although I'm getting excellent results boosting the resolution width to 720. I might have to reduce that to 640, which still look great.

WMP is pretty good. The video quality I'm getting beats TCPMP on Palm. I did figure out that in the Options on the Video tab "Play video in full screen: Always" means that once I start playback, the video goes to landscape/full screen mode. What I can't figure out is what "Scale to fit window" does. You'd think it did what it says, right? Well, I've turned that off, I've turned it on, and I don't see a difference. None at all. Maybe it's some kind of defect. My initial guess was that if I could turn it off, I wouldn't need to set cropping to zero in HB. In fact, anamorphic encoding might have worked if I could get the darn WMP to stop zooming!

Oh well. Time to watch the Bourne trilogy.

[Mi An]

I got a Star Trek DVD that came with a mobile copy on the disc. I'll be giving WMP a spin with that this weekend.

I'm still not likely to do conversion on a regular basis -- I used to do it for my TX and finally gave up because they whole thing annoyed me (I'm easy to annoy ), but I might do it for road trips, vacations and other special occasions if it plays as nice as you say. Even at that, I'll never stop being annoyed at how little codec support it has. I frigging chose xvid for my library's format because of how easy it would be for anything to support.

Anyway, after years of hearing about it, I finally googled handbrake. Funny, I always assumed it was a commercial package.

[jigwashere]

I've been away at a conference this week. I was bummed about forgetting my headphones, but happened to have my TV Out cable. I simply connected my TP2 to the wide screen TV and played my videos. The quality wasn't bad at all, probably better than analog TV. I'd previously recorded a couple of sitcoms, the national news from the previous night, and a movie. I didn't watch the movie, which would've been higher res (maybe I'll do that tonight), but even the lower res TV shows played well.

[Varjak]

Jig, I should have told you about anamorphic; but it seemed like you were sure that that part was fine. Someone else (Raspabalsa I think) discovered that AVC coding on Handbrake would work on the TX/LD IF anamorphic was off. It seems that the calculations required to do this REALLY overwhelm the Palm CPU's (and I guess the TP2's also).

I have to say, I have never figured out what 'anamorphic' means in terms of video conversions for palmtops. (I understand the concept for optics.) How does anamorphic differ from using the setting for HB that lets you set the width and then lets HB set the height? I haven't noticed much distortion that way. I tried to hash this out on HB's forum; but I got killed (someone thought I was challenging him in some way), so I gave up.

HB also recommends (if you use it at all) to use the 'loose anamorphic' setting, which rounds the dimensions to units of 16, to aid in conversion (i.e. for the Palm one would want results like: 480x256, 480x272, etc. depending on the aspect ratio of the source material). That still didn't result in a usable file on the Palm; but it might for you. I don't know if that came up.