Getting the Most out of Your Video Gadget Storage - Concluding Thoughts
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Indeed, we've arrived at the end of this article. That means we're ending this two-part series. We certainly hope that you've found it informative and educational. There was a reasonable amount of delay between the first and second half of this series, but we hope that you don't mind. The bottom line is that by now you should be familiar with the latest bleeding-edge, transcoding techniques that work best for PMPs.
First, we explained some of the basics regarding audio and video codecs, standards, and formats. This theoretical part is really important if the reader wants to truly understand the reasons behind our particular encoding choices and fine-tune these settings to his or her needs. In the world of IT, knowing what happens behind the scenes is better than just doing it without any clue.
We then examined a few software suites that offer the transcoding functions we needed. The main focus was given to freeware applications, especially the ones that feature graphical user interface front ends to common freeware encoders. We also presented a few commercial encoders.
Our main objective was to provide effective strategies that maximize performance-per-quality (size-per-quality, more specifically). Needless to say, you can try out the things you learned in order to encode entire DVD movies and port them on your portable media player. Yeah, we all know that the latest Creative Zen sports 32GB of storage, but some may have the 2GB edition...
You must understand that there are hundreds of encoders-some are free, others are commercial. As a result, recommending one without being biased isn't possible. Most of them are nothing but GUIs to the popular codecs, so they provide the same performance. Others are proprietary and closed source. Therefore, you must try a few and decide for yourself. The ones presented in this article are just examples.
I also provided a personal example of a MPEG2 clip (original resolution: 720x576) that I encoded for the Sony Ericsson K800i (QVGA resolution: 320x240) and Sony Ericsson W200i (QCIF resolution: 176x144) cell phones. Ultimately, we have compared the results. The best thing you can do is tailor the video size to the display/screen size of your gadget or portable media player. This way you'll save lots of resources (both space and processing power, because the gadget won't resize it).
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