Talk:Video Player

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I think the Neo has potential as a video player even with the weak CPU it has right now (that's one of the things I do with my Palm TX). Come on, is anyone going to care if a 2.8" screen is displaying 240x320 or 480x640 video? You can't see a thing anyway ;-)

That said, the chief issue is making sure that the video is transcoded (scaled and pre-rotated) in advance, just as you outline. This *could* be done as a batch job invoked on the phone, or handled by whatever desktop app handles communication with the Moko. There is going to be some sort of app or function that does this transcoding.

Anyhow, I propose that a file extension be created (.mkv, for Moko Video), which is simply MPEG-1 at 240x320 or some resolution like that. This renaming would be done by whatever app did the transformation, and it becomes much easier to explain to grandma why her movie is running at 10fps. (.mkv is taken by Matroska Video, but some custom extension [omv?] may be a good way to emphasize the Moko-spesificness of a clip --Mjr 01:54, 19 April 2007 (CEST))

Even if the movie player turns out crappy, you can still watch Charlie Chaplin vids at a resolution of 150x200 without panic.

Couldn't the video files be encoded in a way that may increase the filesize significantly, but would require less CPU processing for 480x640 playback? I'm not extremely familiar but video encoding but it seems to me that this is a possible solution. -- machee 14:31, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


I would say that even video at 640x480@25 might be possible if it is in a pre converted format. The ipodlinux.org project has managed to play 220x176@18fps on one 80mhz ARM core while running linux. This is using a new format which doesn't compress as well as mpeg2. However rockbox.org has managed to play mpeg2 video at reasonable speed utilizing both cores of the ipod. If you have to preconvert the video anyways, you could either pre-rotate it or even convert it into a different video format. Alternatively if you don't port an existing player, but implement a new one the rotation could also be done while decoding. NsN 19:58, 11 July 2007 (UTC)


I checked the information for the video capabilities of the Rockbox mpegplayer plugin in relation to my iAudio X5 (since that's what I have).

The X5 is running a Motorola SCF5250 (120Mhz) and supports playing video at 160x128 (the full screen res on the device) at 18 fps - which seems to work fine the time or two I've tested it.

The question I would have relating to the Neo1973 is, why does the video need to be rotated (or stretched)?

Would it be easier to simply play a decently sized (i.e. whatever the cpu could handle easily) video in the default screen orientation with no stretching, just with the classic black bar borders(or at least a stretch/no stretch option?)? -- Techiem2

Why rotate? Is xrandr adding much load or is it supposed to output to fb? --Zash 14:42, 9 November 2007 (CET)


I don't understand why video is still difficult. My 4 year old Palm Zire 71 plays videos fairly well. I briefly had a Helio Ocean (released in April 2007) and it was much worse, even on low resolutions. I don't understand why devices are less powerful than they were 4 years ago. Doesn't make sense.--Mateo 02:50, 10 November 2007 (CET)

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