ROK and BBC Worldwide have announced a slew of RS-MMC based videos for Series 60 devices, including episodes of Red Dwarf (Marooned, Quarantine and Cassandra) and Doctor Who (The Five Doctors).
Doctor Who Comes To Symbian
Red Dwarf was cool.
And Doctor Who still is... go figure 😊
I'd steer clear of these personally. I used ROKplayer on my 3230 (It was a copy of Shawshank Redemption). The film is pretty bad in itself and things weren't helped by the poor playback quality. When I looked into further detail, it turns out the the film is just a RealMedia format <shudders>. In these heady days of .3GP, .MP4 and DivX, is there really an excuse for poorly encoded film?
Masamune wrote:I'd steer clear of these personally. I used ROKplayer on my 3230 (It was a copy of Shawshank Redemption). The film is pretty bad in itself and things weren't helped by the poor playback quality. When I looked into further detail, it turns out the the film is just a RealMedia format <shudders>. In these heady days of .3GP, .MP4 and DivX, is there really an excuse for poorly encoded film?
I used to work there. Great crew, mediocre management. Its true the so called "patented technology" was for the most part borrowed or relicensed RealMedia software primarily created with Quicktime, though they are looking into using some free linux software for encoding at higher bitrates.
However, you may be slightly incorrect in what you said above. The 3GP format is not what gets the better quality viewing material, it is actually the density of the bitrate. Shawshank which is an absolute classic can be encoded at 80-110Kb per second at which level it absolutely rocks. However, the processor on certain phones don't have the decoding ability to decode at this higher bitrate, and the phone that you mentioned quite certainly does not.
So, i wish that i could say that this was rok's fault, cause there is no love lost between a number of us and their non-paying management style, but alas, its not rok's fault. It's reall that your phone cpu is not capable of handling the higher bitrate.
Warm regards
trevorW wrote:However, the processor on certain phones don't have the decoding ability to decode at this higher bitrate, and the phone that you mentioned quite certainly does not
Yeah, I can sort of confirm this. I set up a site to distribute free out-of-copyright films for the N-gage, and although I was able to MAKE high quality 3GP format videos, the N-gage wasn't capable of playing them because it used an older standard of 3GP.
In the end I used SmartMovie (which uses the XviD codec by default, but you can use others) and put a link to handango so people could buy the software needed to view it.
Phone makers should put better codecs on their phones, Symbians are capable of really good quality video playback but most people never see it because it requires them to install better playback software on the phone.