I've had a T3 for a while, but I haven't wanted to put video on it until recently.

I've converted a file from a 507.5Mb DivX original to a 166.6Mb Xvid for the T3. I've successfully played it using TCPMP. I have a 1Gb SD card, so the filesize lets me save several of these clips at once, but I wouldn't say no to more. And since the screen size is significantly smaller than the iMac G5 20" monitor I used to watch the original clip, I thought it might possible to make the file smaller.

I'd like to know if anyone has suggestions for doing a better conversion - either in shrinking the file without losing too much quality, or gettting better quality for the same file size.

My original is an AVI DivX, 576 x 304, 25fps
The T3 has a landscape view that shows 480 x 320

Here are my settings:

Video:

Video codec: XviD [.MP4] (ffmpeg)
Video bitrate: 301kbit/s
Video size: 432 x 240
Autosize: 1.85:1
Framerate: 12.5

Audio:

Audio codec: MP3
Audio bitrate: 96kbit/s
Sampling: 11025Hz
Channels: Stereo
Mode: CBR

Options:

High quality
Use B-frames
4-motion vectors
Two-pass encoding

The resultant file plays fine. I'm just wondering if I could tweak it.

Is XviD the best video codec? What about h.264 or 3GP? Or DivX itself? (MPEG Streamclip offers me the choice of another codec called 3ivX - should I consider that?). If you propose another codec, do you know the Options I should set?

Should I use something other than MP3? I see that TCPMP doesn't support AAC, so I can't save file space by using it. How about audio quality - am I exceeding the quality that the T3 can reproduce?

I heard something about how the T3 does a software rotation that slows down playback and drains the battery faster, and that it's better to avoid this by rotating the file as you encode it. But I don't see this option in ffmpegX or MPEG Streamclip 1.7, my main tools.

I set the video width to 432, but when I play the file back in full screen, it fills the screen width. Does this mean I could encode the file with a narrower width and it would still look pretty good?

Is it a good idea to use half the frame rate on the T3?

Does anyone have a link or a document that would help me figure all this out?

Is TCPMP a perfectly adequate player for the Palm or would anyone suggest it's worth shelling out for Kinoma 3 or MMPlayer 1.1?

I did this on ffmpegX 0.0.9v.

I look forward to any feedback.


Mike