New AAS writer Luke Beaman has put together the definitive review of SmartMovie for S60, comparing its performance with that of Nokia's free Video Manager. He also looks at the interface and performance of the SmartMovie player and the built-in S60 RealPlayer, all tested on the Nokia N95 but all also applicable to other recent S60 devices, of course.
Read on in the full article.
One word: SUPER.
Hi Raven, SUPER is pretty versatile I agree, though not a dedicated video convertor for phones like SM and NVM. I reckon Red Kawa's Video 9 is one of the best convertors out there for these purposes, though I would be happy to hear other people's opinions or review requests (I'm Luke).
By the way, you missed out one major advantage of NVM: it's free!
I'd say Nokia Video Manager would be the best for people who want to move videos from their PC to their phone as easily as possible... if it worked properly. At the moment there's far too many bugs, and it would only confuse newbies who do everything correctly but still can't get the software to work.
The main problem with NVM for me is its total refusal to convert Windows Media files, it insists they're all in use by other applications.
Hi Krisse, you are quite right. I thought I had mentioned NVM was free but not to worry. I agree that it is the ideal choice for beginners, apart from it being way too buggy at present. I don't know how Nokia could have released it really - did they not test it??
It could also be commended for it's built in media player except for the fact that most media players now play a wide range of formats - especially MPEG-4.
While it is free and that should give it a certain amount of credit for not being the most feature-packed application, it should at least work!
SmartMovie is a little out of date with codecs but it works a treat and you have an idea of the file size since you control the settings unlike NVM. I think as well as high, medium and low quality, it should have settings for size too - large, medium, small for example - or give you an indication next to the relevant quality setting. Just imagine novices encoding a few films in high quality and not realising they do not have the space to store them, nevermind the time they will have wasted as NVM crawls along encoding them (if it wants).
mudstuff wrote:Hi Raven, SUPER is pretty versatile I agree, though not a dedicated video convertor for phones like SM and NVM.
Hi, Luke. Great review. Very comprehensive.
Dedicated or not - I don't see exactly why that is of much relevance... In addition to being a converter for phones, SUPER also supports a range of other devices... SUPER is highly versatile, mature, supports a whole bunch of formats (both for input and output), it also supports a wide range of screen resolutions and lets not forget that it is completely FREE to use.
I've been experimenting with video encoding for phones since the P800 five years ago and SUPER together with the built-in RealPlayer is by far the best solution I've come across in terms of easy of use, quality and of course cost. SmartMovie was a viable alternative a few years ago when RealPlayer was less mature (i.e. sucked). But now it is pretty much useless, unless you really need to see subtitles.
Even though my E61i 'only' has a 206MHz CPU it plays back video perfectly using SUPER and RealPlayer.
Hi Raven, thanks for the comment. The relevance was that the review covered applications that are purely for converting video for a mobile phone whereas SUPER covers a whole range of devices and applications. That is why I mentioned it. I have dabbled with SUPER and found it quite decent though my preference is Video 9. It's really fast and I have set up my own templates/profiles. All I have to do is drop in the videos and hit one button which I think is great. I shall have a deeper look at SUPER though since you rate it so high.
See also this article, which discusses using SUPER to create super-optimised videos for playback in RealPlayer on a Nokia E61.
http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/76/
Steve
OK, what about this: SUPER and DivX Player vs both NVM/Real Player and SM. Both are free and the quality is the same like in SM. This is my option. I still don't get it why so many people are searching for a cracked version of SM when SUPER and DivX Player can do exactly the same thing for free...
slitchfield wrote:See also this article, which discusses using SUPER to create super-optimised videos for playback in RealPlayer on a Nokia E61.http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/76/
Steve
Hmm, that was a weird test. The reviewer uses 12.5fps and mentiones that one should never go above 15fps - Bollocks! :tongue: All the videos I have encoded using SUPER are 25-30fps and play back flawlessly on the E61(i).
Jeez, 160kbps for a 320x240 @ 12.5 fps... No wonder the videos look like shit. I use bitrates between 224...320kbps on a 176x208 screen, even if the file resulted is bigger plus I never change the frame rate. The bitrate used by this guy is way too low for E61(i)'s screen resolution. I'm using 288kbps at full framrate on my N70 and the screen is half the number of pixels. The audio should be higher than 96kbps for an mp3 codec. A 90 minutes video takes around 300MB, but the quality is incredible, even with the "substantially worse" DivX Player. I only use Real player for videos taken with the phone. I'm curious what settings would recommend this guy to use on a N95 or N93; probably the same 12.5 fps?
Wow! While some of the theory was sound regarding containers, codecs and bitrate, the testing and conclusions were fatally flawed. I can only assume that while this reviewer knows the theory, he cannot do the practical. Perhaps he set video to uncompressed or something when first testing?
Who knows. I get full framerate playback on my N95 and no jerky motion whatsoever. The phone can capture video at a high framerate so naturally can play this back. Likewise, the E61 is a powerful phone and I am sure can handle this too.
mudstuff wrote:
Who knows. I get full framerate playback on my N95 and no jerky motion whatsoever. The phone can capture video at a high framerate so naturally can play this back. Likewise, the E61 is a powerful phone and I am sure can handle this too.
That's exactly what I was talking about. If my old N70 can play 30 fps, I doubt that an E61 can't.
Definately ratza. I agree with you 100%. There are some great apps out there now. It would be nice to have an encoder that is aware of each phone and what it can handle, offering you various settings to meet your quality/size requirements. SmartMovie used to do some of this quite well so hopefully they will update the software or maybe if SUPER created an encoder specifically for mobiles and made the interface switchable between a simple one for novice users and one similar to its current UI.
Mudstuff, what version of Video 9 do you mean ? Is it the PSP one?
I'm really into wathing movies on my phones. Hopefully you will give us more of these great reviews on the subject.
Thanks Jonek, I am happy to review other software for users. I used PS3Video 9. You can find some information on n95users.com, posted by member btc. Btc has even created some profiles for the N95 which are very good, though I have created my own.
You can find this info at http://www.n95users.com/forum/third-party-apps/1158-ps3video9-video-conversion.html