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IT must
have been a merry Christmas for makers of iWhatevers,
smart phones, pocket computers and assorted microgaming
devices.
Two
years ago, when I last flew to
Key West,
Florida,
everyone was listening to their iPods, both at the
airport and on the flight. This time, I’d guess about 30
percent of the people, including my daughter, weren’t
listening—they were watching or playing.
The
trouble, of course, is getting content into these
devices. Hollywood and its partners prefer you pay full
price for video that’s been down-sampled to fit a tiny
screen and is difficult to get out of the device and
onto your regular TV set. The teen-preferred method is
to download pirated video via a BitTorrent client, which
has the advantage of being trivially simple and free, if
illegal.
Crabby
Old Lou’s preferred method, which we’ll cover this week,
is to start with a nice full-size program source, say, a
TV show recorded to your PC or a DVD that you own. In
the case of the DVD, you break the encryption using DVD
decrypter or a similar program (see doom9.net for
details, including your largely theoretical legal
liabilities).
An
hour-and-a-half of video gives you one big honking file
of 5 to 8 gigabytes that you store on your computer’s
hard drive. On a high-definition television set, the
output from a PC looks better than that from a
run-of-the-mill DVD player, especially if you use my
favorite video program, VLC media player, to deinterlace
and up-sample the files.
But
there’s a problem: The files are too big to fit more
than two on a tiny Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC)
card, which top out at 16 gigabytes. So now you need to
transform your content to a more manageable size. Root
around on the Internet, and you may find a dedicated
converter for your device. I saw a couple for iWhatevers,
the BlackBerry and even, good grief, Nokia phones. Some
cost; some are open source. I tried one that Nokia
issued for my N800 tablet PC: The program, which ran
under Windows XP, crashed.
In
searching for a more robust solution, I ran across
another gem of an open-source program, Super, which is a
Swiss Army knife of video converters.
What’s
neat about the program is that it doesn’t do much work
itself—it merely ties together the best open-source
video programs and codecs (compression systems) in a
user-friendly graphical shell. Last time I wrote about
video converters, I tried a few and found them über-geeky
and head-bangingly painful to use (even the names will
make you crazy: ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, mppenc,
ffmpeg2theora and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plug).
These
are now built into Super, so all you need is a little
knowledge to point and click and get things working.
Codecs that are compatible with various devices,
including iPods, Zunes, Nintendo and Sony PlayStations,
can be picked from a menu. Contemporary codecs are more
efficient than the ones used to encode DVDs, so you’ll
see a major shrinkage of your files.
You’ll
want to play with the trade-off between file size and
video quality, too. A standard DVD outputs files at 720
by 480 pixels, the latter being “interlaced” (that is,
alternate lines are displayed every other frame). This
is really overkill on a tiny screen. You have the option
of reducing the size, the bit rate and number of frames
that are played per second.
I cut
way back to 320 by 176 pixels for the Nokia, which looks
pretty good on the tiny screen, and yields files about a
10th the size of the original. Blade Runner, for
example, went from 5.2 gigabytes to a mere 483
megabytes, so I could fit upward of 35 movies on an SDHC
card. The quality is fine on the tiny Nokia’s 4-inch
screen, but it isn’t anything you’d play back on TV or
even on your 19-inch computer monitor, at least not if
you’re fussy.
I didn’t
run any time tests, but you can queue up a pile of
videos and let the thing run overnight, which is what I
did, and had about 20 films ready to go by morning. Then
I pulled my SD card from the Nokia, inserted it into the
PC, and copied over the files. I’m still not 100-percent
happy with the output, which doesn’t quite match the
screen dimensions, but I’ll get it right eventually.
Super
runs on Macs, PCs and various flavors of Linux. You can
download it at www.erightsoft .com/super.html. |
