help with smartmovie

You can't really help it. The 9500 simply doesn't have enough power, it's not really built as a multimedia device.

I really don't think its a "power" isssue.

The screen ratio of the 9500 *obviously* limits the size of the video, and that's beyond discussion. And the current built-in player is very poor. Right. But it doesn't mean there won't be better players in the near future. Someone simply has to write a good player taking advantage of the TI OMAP 1510 and its DSP chip. On the PocketPC platform everybody uses Beta player because it is ten thousand times better than the built in cr*ppy Windows Media Player. It will be the case with 9500, too. But it requires some time for developers to familiarize themselves with the new platform and start writing good software. Remember that 9500 is very different to 9210 in terms of free resources. The 9210 was a VERY limited platform and that's why most of the developers don't have much experience with writing advanced applications for Communicators simply because the 9210(i) didn't allow anything more advanced with its 3 MB free RAM and 52 MHz CPU. In 9500, it's the same CPU as in HP iPAQ 6315 and it's capable of playing full screen video, especially with its DSP core - apparently totally not used by current multimedia applications. So it is ONLY the software that lags behind. But software is something you can change/update/add.

Here's a show review of video performance on the iPAQ 6315 which uses the same CPU as the 9500.

Using PocketTV Enterprise Edition to play "The Chosen" (a neat BMW flick with Clive Owen) which is a 4:26 minute long, 10 meg MPEG1 file recorded at 320 x 240, 308 kb/s, the iPAQ managed a respectable 24.13 fps. PocketMVP played "The Chosen" at 23.46 fps, and dropped 144 out of 6394 frames. The 6315 played the Spider Man trailer file commonly found on the web (240 x 136, 452Kb/s encoded MPEG 1 file) at 22.06 fps and dropped a more lackluster 214 out of 2640 frames, though the film looked good during playback. My own test MPEG1 file burned from a DVD at a whopping 700 Kb/s didn't look smooth in playback and suffered a high percentage of dropped frames. It played back at 8.5 fps. PocketTV did a better job, playing back at a watchable 16.7 fps. In comparison, the XDA II (currently the fastest Pocket PC phone) played the same movie at 23.97 fps using PocketTV Enterprise and PocketMVP. The XDA II has an ATI graphics chip for which both PocketTV and PocketMVP have optimizations.

If you're a video fan using PocketMVP, I'd recommend playing movies encoded at 300 Kb/s-- if you go significantly higher, playback quality will suffer. Using PocketTV Enterprise, you can go higher, but I'd say that 300 Kb/s is the target for fast and smooth playback for all players and movie media types. If you burn your own DVDs to Pocket PC format and love watching high quality videos encoded at 600 Kb/s on the PDA, the iPAQ 6315 might not be the best choice since its video playback isn't superior.

So,the iPAQ can playback a 700 Kbps video at 16.7 FPS while the 9500 can only go to 12-15 FPS for a 112Kbps video.The difference is amazing.

I didn't mean power, as in CPU only, but a combi off CPU and OS.

You are right, the difference is amazing, but don't forget PPC and Symbian OS (S80) are a very diffent OS. And as I said, the 9500 wasn't really built for multimedia applications

I use mencoder (a linux tool which comes with mplayer) to convert my movies. Settings are:

nice $MENCODER \
-of avi \
-ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=500:interlacing \
-afm ffmpeg \
-af resample=16000,channels=1 \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 \
-noskip \
-vop scale=-3:200,framestep=3$crop \
"$infile" \
-o "$tmpfile"

Since i encode only every 3rd frame (framestep=3) the resulting video bitrate is 500/3 = ~170 kBit/s. For movies i specify crop=",crop=720:440".

The resulting avi files run smooth. Nevertheless you see that it has less than 25 frames/s. But i figured that I'd rather have a constant quality than a slide show whenever movements get fast.

Cya, Chris

Delta737 wrote:I didn't mean power, as in CPU only, but a combi off CPU and OS.

You are right, the difference is amazing, but don't forget PPC and Symbian OS (S80) are a very diffent OS.

It doesn't have anything to do with the OS/UI. In fact Symbian is much less recourse hungry than Win Mobile. It seems apparent to me that the software SmartMovie needs to be improved. The simple fact that a S60 phone with a slower and inferior processor can run SmartMovie vids smoothly at 15fps and the 9500 can't even get half the performance, is a pretty sure sign that the folks at Lonely Cat Games really need to spend some time optimising the S80 version.

I doubt that. I think the fact Smartmovie runs so smoothly on other devices and so bad on the 9500 shows the "weakness" of the 9500, besides the Real player is lagging as well.

Not that I really care personally, as I said, the 9500 is not meant for multimedia.

Delta737 wrote:I doubt that. I think the fact Smartmovie runs so smoothly on other devices and so bad on the 9500 shows the "weakness" of the 9500, besides the Real player is lagging as well.

RealPlayer is lagging on ALL Symbian phones, it's not a very well written piece of software. It is also hardcoded into the firmware - which is in dire need of improvement as well. You are mistaken about this "weakness". If SmartMovie was coded properly (to take advantage of the hardware), it would definitely work better. There aren't anything holding it back OS/UI-wise, as you seem to think. Symbian is an open OS, and developers are given the proper APIs to take advantage of that, as well as the hardware. You'll see that I'm right when programmers start getting familiar with S80 v.2.0 and more powerful multimedia applications start popping up.

Offcourse I do HOPE that you're right. But since all pre-installed software (browser, PIM) aren't that fast either I was under the impression that it was a bit underpowered (for good reason offcourse, like to safe the battery...)

Yeah, it seems that the folks at Nokia have some work cut out for them in improving the firmware...

do u guys happen to knw any other good softwares for playin smooth movies. Lonely Cat Games has to spend way more time with the 95... than the other phones

There is no alternative application available ATM i'm afraid except the built-in real player which sucks even more.

Smartmovie and Real player are the only Video players available for the 9500 (for now)

Edit: You just beat me to it GhostDog 😃

You still haven't discovered the Post Amazingly Quick Reply Button? 😃

I've been watching through the Mysterious Cities Of Gold on my 9500, files are in realvideo format at 150kb/s, unsure of the res though tbh. Non-theless the 9500 presents smooth playback and very little jerkiness. Far more than can be said for the 9210 in a similar situation. I'm yet to look at smartmovie but it sounds like not worth bothering.