Nokia 9500 users have been complaining recently about the video playback quality of the default RealPlayer. And now, only a few days after frustrated Communicator users started flooding Lonely Cat Games's mail box, they have indeed stepped up to the plate and come to the rescue. Lonely Cat Games' excellent SmartMovie video player should provide those 9500 users with the movie experience they so desperately crave for.
Author's note:
SmartMovie is a video player for your mobile device, with counterpart PC converter utility. With the converter, you may prepare any video clip for playback on your mobile device.
Play your videos on your mobile device, anywhere, anytime, you need just a few steps:
- Convert any video file on your PC into a phone-friendly video file.
Upload video into device/memory card. - Play the video in SmartMovie Player installed on your mobile device.
Features:
- Standard AVI format, allowing you to preview converted files on your PC.
- Uses downloadable video codecs, allowing you to compress and play back videos in your favorite format.
- PC converter allows you to split video file into multiple segments, so that it fits onto your memory card, if not entire, then cut to more parts - you may watch your favorite video in parts, e.g. while traveling to work/school.
- First mobile player which supports subtitles - allowing you to watch movies in different languages.
- Friendly PC converter - preview videos on PC, select parts you want to convert, alter quality.
- Supports DirectShow codecs, so you may use video codecs downloadable from the internet.
- Very fast conversion, on standard PC conversion is 5x faster than video clip playback time. You will convert entire movie in just a few minutes
- Bicubic rescale algorithm shrinks video to small screen size in best possible quality.
- Adjustable quality parameters for video and audio streams, allowing to tune target video to your needs.
- Customizable video Player (brightness, audio sync, volume , and more).
Requirements:
- 300 KB for SmartMovie player on the mobile device
- PC with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Nice! Good to see they're listening to their customers!
Full marks for them for getting a C++ 9500 app out quickly, but having tried SmartMovie on the 9500 I was rather disappointed. Performance is no better than the built-in RealPlayer. And taking the picture size up/cropped (e.g. 350 by 200 pixels) makes the frame rate droop to around 5 or 6 fps.
Either more optimisation needs to be done in their player or the 9500 really hasn't got enough oomph under the bonnet to shove pixels round the screen?
I wish Nokia had put in a 300MHz processor - I'd have traded a few hours off battery life in order to see things happen faster...
Steve Litchfield
slitchfield wrote:Performance is no better than the built-in RealPlayer. And taking the picture size up/cropped (e.g. 350 by 200 pixels) makes the frame rate droop to around 5 or 6 fps.
That sounds strange. I think you need to play around with the settings a bit more...
SmartMovie works like a charm on S60 and UIQ, so I can't imagine it being any worse on the more powerful 9500.
Have you tried setting the video bit rate to 128kbps and audio to 64kbps, and ticking the 'reduced frames' box? These settings should work well on a clip encoded in a 356 X 200 (16:9) resolution. Further reducing the resolution, should give you even better frame rate.
Raven wrote:Have you tried setting the video bit rate to 128kbps and audio to 64kbps, and ticking the 'reduced frames' box? These settings should work well on a clip encoded in a 356 X 200 (16:9) resolution. Further reducing the resolution, should give you even better frame rate.
Yes, in fact I've used even less demanding bit rates. I'm still only getting between 5 and 10 fps, depending on what's going on in the clip. Maybe I'm expecting too much. At least it's cool to be able to convert in 'cropped' mode, giving a bit more detail in each frame.
I was hoping for more, but then I've just been reviewing PPCs at 600MHz, which can play 240 by 240 videos at nigh-on 25 fps. I guess if you do the math and divide the processor speed down, it all works out about right. Which backs up my wish for a faster processor in the 9500 8-)
Steve Litchfield
slitchfield wrote:Yes, in fact I've used even less demanding bit rates. I'm still only getting between 5 and 10 fps, depending on what's going on in the clip. Maybe I'm expecting too much.
If you're really only getting 5fps, you are of course not expecting too much. I cannot believe that's the quality you're getting. On S60 and UIQ the playback is smooth at around 12-15fps. What kind of source file are you trying to encode?
Your comment is the first negative one about SmartMovie I've read. Other users seem to be satisfied with the playback quality...
I was hoping for more, but then I've just been reviewing PPCs at 600MHz, which can play 240 by 240 videos at nigh-on 25 fps. I guess if you do the math and divide the processor speed down, it all works out about right. Which backs up my wish for a faster processor in the 9500 8-)
Aaargh... 😊 It's not just about the clock speed people! The dual core TI OMAP1510 processor w/ DSP used in the 9500 is very powerful indeed (read: http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12314&path=templatedata/cm/product/data/omap_1510).
You cannot directly compare the clock speed of such a CPU to the CPU used in the PPC (XScale?), as they have a very different architecture.
Raven wrote:If you're really only getting 5fps, you are of course not expecting too much. I cannot believe that's the quality you're getting. On S60 and UIQ the playback is smooth at around 12-15fps. What kind of source file are you trying to encode?
I've tried a WMV and AVI (MPEG-4) and a MPG (MPEG-1), all coming down from approx Video CD resolution, and in each case the frame rate has been similar. Are you SURE that LCG have used the full power (dual core, etc.) of the processor in this product?
Come on others. Who else has tried this on a real 9500?
Steve Litchfield
Oh yes, and the sample videos run at similar fps, too. So it's really nothing I'm doing at the encoding stage.
Steve
Agreed, it's the same poor peformance, if you look at it though, the 9500 isn't just having performace problems with video playback, it's also very slow at "drawing" webpages when using WLAN, it's like the internet connection is faster than the device can cope with. Also true when opening any application at all, the drawing/refresh of the UI is extremely slow.
I hope this is a problem that can be fixed in a firware update, there is something not right with the 9500...didn't bother me before, but as time goes on i've realised that it really does effect just about every aspect of the phone. Movie/Web/Mail/Cursor Refresh/Menus....all very slow in the UI...I don't think the poor performace of Real Player/Smartmovie is at all down to the indvidual software at all, I think it has more to do with the "big picture" of the device as a whole (At least with 4.44 firmware), can't say for sure what the problem is but I sure hope Nokia are taking it seriously.
If this problem doesn't go away after the first few firmware releases then i'm pretty sure the 9500 will be a huge failiure after all the pre release hype it received.
Don't want to jump the gun just yet, but lets just say i'm looking forward to seeing how Series 90/7710 performs.