I have written a couple of previous posts about my experiences using the T-Mobile HTC G1 Android Google phone, including an in-depth look at how it handles video playback. As a way to help other G1 users get video on to their phones, I put together this step-by-step guide to using the MeGUI application to encode video into a format that the G1 can play, while retaining as much quality as possible. Because of the relatively low resolution of G1 compatible video, I have not focused as much on making the files as small in size as possible, but once you’ve mastered the basic steps outlined here, you should not have too much trouble tweaking the process to get smaller sizes if that is of importance to you. With microSD cards getting cheaper and cheaper, I frankly have not found much need to really optimize encoding for size, but your needs may differ.
Necessary tools:
The first step is to download and install the required software. This first version of this guide is
PC only, but again, it would not take too much effort to replicate the steps shown here on a Mac of Linux computer. If anybody has specific questions about those alternatives, please just drop me a line.
Read more…
As a follow up to my previous posts about the G1 Android phone from T-Mobile (and Google!), and from a personal interest, I wanted to gather as much information about the phone’s video capabilities as I could. In general, there has not been much information available about the detailed video specifications of the G1, which has proven somewhat frustrating to those people interested in using it as a portable viewing device.
At the basic level, the G1 can decode the
h.264 codec in .mp4 and .m4v container formats. If you are familiar with iPod/iPhone video capabilities, you should recognize those specs, as they are pretty close to what Apple is using. And that is likely not a coincidence, as my guess is that video was somewhat neglected in the G1’s development and choices were defaulted to an already established format. I assume that video as a category was overlooked for a number of reasons: unlike the iPhone with iTunes, there is no established commercial entity selling video content for the G1. But probably more important is the fact that Android is a platform targeted for a number of different hardware devices, and not just phones but MID’s, netbooks, etc. It probably did not make a lot of sense for the Android developers at Google to put a lot of time into a video format that may only be specific one device, the G1. And from the other direction, the actual manufacturer of the phone, HTC, I suspect probably handed everything over to Google, since video can be something of a headache for phone makers without a lot of expertise in this area. In other words, G1 users were kind of left on their own when it comes to video, something pretty clearly shown by the fact that the phone did not even come with a native video player application! A couple popped up almost immediately, but they are not particularly sophisticated or polished.
An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums. As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above photo shows, Microsoft is breaking with their tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle. Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite mystifying to many users trying to watch a DVD in their computers for the first time. And, needless to say, Microsoft stayed far away from any of the more esoteric codecs, including the key MPEG-4 ASP implementations such as DivX and Xvid.
However, the beta of Windows 7 includes the ability to play back DivX, and Xvid, and even the next generation MPEG-4 AVC, better known as h.264. Why is this important? A couple things. First, if anybody needed further proof that VC-1 is essentially dead in the water, this is another nail in its coffin (to mix macabre metaphors). Secondly, and more importantly, it appears that Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon of broad interoperability, allowing Windows users to play back a range of video formats right out of the box, something that will surely be a boon to less sophisticated users who just want to be able to watch something without having to even know what a codec is, much less a container format, audio stream, etc.
Even more intriguing is the news that Microsoft may be working on an implementation of the matroska container, or mkv for Windows 7 (according to madshi and haali on doom9). For the file-trading community, this is quite significant. H.264 has a ton of “legitimate” uses today, notably in higher quality Flash videos on YouTube and elsewhere. MKV however, is almost exclusively used currently by pirates, particularly those sharing HD video. Blu-Ray rips and high def TV captures are generally distributed as x264 encodes with AC3 audio in mkv containers (both 720p and 1080p), and while HD video content is still a small minority of what is shared relative to standard def video, it is growing and is likely to become the dominant format before long. Maybe Microsoft is just getting back at the movie studios that went with Blu-Ray instead of the MS-backed HD-DVD formats, but regardless, it would be good news if mkv support signaled that Microsoft was thinking about their users first, and video business strategies second.