Getting the Most out of Your Video Gadget Storage
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A few months ago, the first half of this series was published. We investigated the most effective ways to manage our audio gadget resources effectively by becoming frugal and learning how to encode our favorite audio tunes. The theme of this article remains the same, but now our focus is going to be on video transcoding possibilities. We’ll use freeware codec front ends and utilities to encode our video files.Before we begin, I'd like to advocate reading the first article of this series, titled "
Getting the Most out of Your Audio Gadget Storage." It isn't shameful to refresh our memory every now and then. In that article, there's a part where I introduced the HE-AAC v2 audio format and standard. You shouldn't ignore that segment because when we run into video transcoding situations, we almost always have to deal with audio too.
Therefore, you can bet that we're going to talk about audio formats, such as the mpeg4-aac, amr-nb, amr-wb, and perhaps even the ultra-popular mp3. Strong emphasis is going to be placed on video transcoding, however. Thus, we'll cover some of the most efficient and state-of-art standards, like the MPEG-4 and H.263. During this tutorial the output video format is going to be either 3GPP (.3gp) or 3GPP2 (.3g2).
I'm sure you could have guessed that this article targets the relatively new (few years old) portable media players. That's why we are going to approach the transcoding from the perspective of getting the most out of what we already have by minimizing the space required to store these multimedia files without sacrificing quality. We'll fine-tune the encoding settings to meet our requirements.
Once you finish reading this article you're going to have a strong grasp of the basics of video and audio transcoding combined with a broad knowledge of software suites and freeware front ends for codecs. Therefore, you should be able to port your experience and apply the things you've learned into other areas of multimedia encoding, such as working with DVDs, TV show recordings, you name it.
Nonetheless, you must understand what the scope of this article is. After that, we can move on. Basically, if you own any half-decent portable media player (PMP) and/or cell phone that is able to play back videos, you should be anxiously waiting for us to begin. I'm going to name a few: Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia, NEC, Siemens, Zune, iPod, iPhone, PS3, iRiver, SanDisk Sensa, Archos PMA400, Creative Zen, etc.
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