Database Users

Questions from a potential wizard owner

I really like the wizard (cingular 8125) and am planning to get it but I have too questions about the product.
Is the wizard capable of smooth vidoe playback? I don't mind re-encoding to 320X240 using whichever format works the best. Needed for my long international flights. I don't want to buy an iPod video as that would be an extra item that I have to carry around halfway across the world.
Can windows mobile compatible games such as age of empires be played on the wizard? Again for those long flights.
Thanks is advance,
Smit

Yes and Yes
If you want decent video running you'll need to overclock (see Overclocking thread)

Does overclocking reduce the processor life as I plan to use it for atleast 2-4 years. I know this is true for desktop processor but don't know much abt pocket pc processors. Battery life is not a big concern as I plan to buy an additional battery anyway.
Thanks,
Smit

You don't need to overclock the Wizard if you're re-encoding video specifically for it. If you're watching high bitrate media that you encoded for your PC then yes, overclocking will help you view that kind of media but video that's specifically encoded at QVGA with a medium bitrate should work fine at the default clock speed.
I personally however keep my Wizard overclocked for other reasons, and yes the battery does drain quicker. It's a logical assumption that overclocking the Wizard will decrease the processor's lifetime but it's anyone's guess by how long. (Does anyone even know how long the Wizard's processor will last for under specifications?) However, since these processors are designed to run in ultra-low power modes with no active cooling, and low heat emissions, it would be purely my EDUCATED GUESS that the difference in life expectancy is negligible.

No one knows the awnser to that question, so far we have had very few reports of any problem with overclocking. Personally i overclock but plan only to keep my phone a year(I change it yearly) ,i would not be happy to overclock it longer than this because in theory it must shorten the life of some cpu's. However you can get perfectly good video at normal cpu speeds using xvid or divx at 320 x 240 res at 20 fps - at this it wont drop any frames. As for games most work fine but the really graphics intensive will be slow. If you can wait the htc hermes comes out soon which is very like the wizard but has a samsung 300 mhz processor which people say is equiv to intel 400 Mhz processor. Choice is yours - most users on the forum are very pleased with their wizard and i would consider replacing my wizard with a new one in six months time.

Does anyone know how windows mobile games such as pocket age of empires (big fan of it since it was initially released during pentium II days) runs on the wizard. I was considering Hermes but I don't really need the 3G capabilities and I am quite sure it is going to be a lot more expensive than the Wizard. I don't even thnk it will be offered in the US by the carriers as they don't seem to have wide UMTS coverage nor will they have one in the near future.
Thanks,
Smit

I'll try that game for you - interested myself how the game is and how it runs. Keep you posted.

Age of empires runs just great even with the phone not overclocked - was in demo mode though don't know if there are any more qraphics intensive parts of the game. Looks addictive though, a bit like spb airislands which i have and that is good. Q can it be completed without too much killing, i am not into meaningless killing - might consider buying the game.

Thanks for trying Age of Empires. Yes it is a very addictive game and you could easily spend hours. You could get by without killing a lot of people but this requires skill. Anyway I am looking forward to my new Cingular 8125.
Thanks,
Smit

I had this game running on my orginal xda without any problems so the wizard should fly it

What do you guys think of the eten M600 vs. the Wizard.
The M600 has a much faster processor (even beats Jasjar) but no edge and keyboard which also makes it slimmer than the Wizard.

a queston about another phone, in the wizard section, in a thread asking about the wizard... RANDOM

bsmit007 said:
I really like the wizard (cingular 8125) and am planning to get it but I have too questions about the product.
Is the wizard capable of smooth vidoe playback? I don't mind re-encoding to 320X240 using whichever format works the best. Needed for my long international flights. I don't want to buy an iPod video as that would be an extra item that I have to carry around halfway across the world.
Can windows mobile compatible games such as age of empires be played on the wizard? Again for those long flights.
Thanks is advance,
Smit
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i actually downsample all my vids using pocket divx encoder to 320x240, and i use TCPMP to play stuff. works fantastic, and i get comments from people all the time about how good the video looks. size is nice too. i can fit ~4 full-length feature films on my 1gig card, and have some space left over.
i did notice recently that i had to overclock for perfectly smooth playback of compressed video while using a2dp streaming, but hey, that's to be expected.
fantastic device. gives me a chubby every time i touch it.
...

Me too, but I would highly advise against having sex with your HTC Wizard. I believe it voids your warranty

great so it looks like ill have to oc when my wizard arrives.
by any chance are there any higher capacity batteries for this phone out??

Hello all! Great, very helpful site!!! Fantastic!
I, too, am looking into getting an 8125 through Cingular and after reading through this thread I had a couple of questions:
1) If anyone is familiar with it, and if I had a 2Gb mini sd, could I play the original Unreal Tournament on the 8125?
2) I have quite a few tv shows on my HD (xvid). How would I go about changing them to 320x240 res?
Any help is appreciated!
Matt

matt0525 said:
2) I have quite a few tv shows on my HD (xvid). How would I go about changing them to 320x240 res?
Any help is appreciated!
Matt
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I use PocketDivxEncoder - http://divx.ppccool.com/
Free, & easy to use.

Tezcatlipoca said:
I use PocketDivxEncoder - http://divx.ppccool.com/
Free, & easy to use.
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Thanks a lot!! You rock!!!!

Compression of films onto datacard

What is the best way to compress a DVD onto a the memory card. I see no point in carrying a film that would support a full size screen resolution when I could probably get four or five films in the same space for 320x240 (or lower) and have a better battery duration for less processor usage?

For encoding: PocketDivXEncoder - http://divx.ppccool.com/
For viewing: The Core Pocket Media Player - http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about
I've got Serenity on my phone now at about ~250MB, I could probably shrink it down a bit more and it would be watchable.

perfect choice

Thanks
Which is the best format to compress to - and why do you recommend using the Core PMP rather than the Windows MP installed already?

TCMP can play any multimedia file, every format. It has a built in equalizer. It manages playlists much better than WMP. Lots of settings to play with but works very well out of the box with the default settings. As for the format... As long as you resize to 320x240, you can let pocketdivx encoder do its job (it has templates to make it easier) If you'd rather have mpeg files, then TmpgEnc is also a good bet.
Have fun!

Is it worthwhile going for Lathe the $6 version - or is the free one you recommended fine?
http://www.omniquiti.com/store_pde.html
The site says they are still supporting the free version - but obviously recommend the one you pay them for?

wizardragon said:
Is it worthwhile going for Lathe the $6 version - or is the free one you recommended fine?
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I guess the real question is do you find $6.00 worth of value in the product this developer has offered-up for you and would you like to see them continue to improve it?
If so then pay the $6.00, I mean really how much cheaper could it be?
I shelled out $4.00 for 3D Air Hockey, great deal considering the hours of entertainment I've received in return for such a small contribution to the author.

The free version is perfectly fine, but I would pay them just for the pleasure of supporting such great software.
V

Help! Video playback jerky- is there any fix?

I might be in the wrong forum, I'm not hugely experienced- but I have a problem with my Advantage, and it is not easy to find forums about it.
I've got the X7500- and now I want to show small avi clips on my Advantage- wma files are really jerky and when I put the original avi clips in- they were better, but not smooth. Is there any work around? I am loading them into the micro-drive, since I don't have much in there- but I only have the WMplayer. Is there a better one?
This is a little bragging tool for me - the clips are not long- (I can't bore my viewers!) I don't want to watch a movie or anything... just show the progress of my young horse, and also of me actually on him. so the action is fairly quick.
I am a work-in-progress, expertise-wise... what I get interested in using- I spend the time to learn (usually has to be dead of night- Not much other time left after riding 2 horses in the day!.)
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi and welcome, I would try "TCPMP" found here "http://www.freewareppc.com/multimedia/tcpmp.shtml"
I use it and it works great. You may need to read the Help Me file after installing it. Good Luck...TJ

Thank you for the welcome! I downloaded and installed the coreplayer- and figured out the adding to playlist and file assoc. Once I did that- it got rid of the WMplayer assoc. thankfully!
I had come across mention of "TCPMP" in my reading, but didn't know enough about it.
I am running WM6 and it had asked for WM5 so I didn't know if it was compatible. Since it runs- I guess it is!
Thank you for your help and quick reply.
Barb

NP if I can help out I will since I have been helped out by so many in this forum. Good luck and enjoy...TJ

TCPMP is a free version which was later added with some lice looking skin and sold as coreplayer!
Believe me, TCPMP(free) plays video better than CorePlayer(commercial)!
Because of the fact that some codes used in TCPMP have no legal issues since its distributed free but Core cannot have them!
Regards,
Carty..

I have purchased coreplayer 1.21 and have been happily surprised by the improvements over TCPMP, including the youtube built in. Absolutely great for showing 'Achmed the dead terrorist' to my mates at work.
What I found to improve things, even when using TCPMP 0.72 was to encode the fils to the proper size.
Now there have been endless discussions in these forums about the best codecs to use, and the best resolutions and such, and everyone seemed to have a different result. seems each athena is slightly different. All i can say is that by using a program called handbrake at the recommendation of someone here, and setting the resolution to 640 by whatever, the video bit rate to somewhere between 600 and 750 kbps depending on the length of the film (I try to keep all films to around 512mb) and the audio bitrate to 128mb mp3, i get superb quality playback, to the envy of all my mates who have other older and newer HTC devices and other PPC's.
Best recommendation is to trawl through the pages and pages of video encoding threads here in the athena forum and try them all. Find which one is best for you and gets the quality you want and stick with that method.

oh yeah, and Windows media player is just simply terrible for video. never use it if you can possibly help it!

Thanks for that explanation! TCPMP loads in and shows up as Coreplayer, but it very plain. but since I don't need fancy- just something that works nicely- it is great. Once I figured out where to customize settings I was good to go! I've had PPcs for 8 years now, and the Advantage I love. worth every penny! and I still haven't activated the phone (only one carrier in Canada- and I don't like them!)

rhedgehog said:
I have purchased coreplayer 1.21 and have been happily surprised by the improvements over TCPMP, including the youtube built in. Absolutely great for showing 'Achmed the dead terrorist' to my mates at work.
What I found to improve things, even when using TCPMP 0.72 was to encode the fils to the proper size.
Now there have been endless discussions in these forums about the best codecs to use, and the best resolutions and such, and everyone seemed to have a different result. seems each athena is slightly different. All i can say is that by using a program called handbrake at the recommendation of someone here, and setting the resolution to 640 by whatever, the video bit rate to somewhere between 600 and 750 kbps depending on the length of the film (I try to keep all films to around 512mb) and the audio bitrate to 128mb mp3, i get superb quality playback, to the envy of all my mates who have other older and newer HTC devices and other PPC's.
Best recommendation is to trawl through the pages and pages of video encoding threads here in the athena forum and try them all. Find which one is best for you and gets the quality you want and stick with that method.
Click to expand...
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Ok, Now you've lost me a little.... there is a program " Handbrake" ? where do you get it and will it customize TCPMP or do you customize the .avi file before you put it in? I'm wanting to load self-videos taken with a canon s1 IS which come out as avi's. I haven't found great success in authoring them with wmv- which is all I've got right now- the advantage of the single original file is quickness- take it.. download it and upload the single clip.
And I've found that WMplayer is terrible! just couldn't get rid of it before the TCPMP.

Anyone know any good places to download movies for the n1?

I would like a few movies to put on my phone but do not know where to download them from where they will have the correct format and all. Does anyone know any good sites? Thanks

We don't discuss warez here.

However there is a recent thread: nexus one video conversion with handbrake

OrganizedFellow said:
We don't discuss warez here.
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I never said they had to be free

Austin021296 said:
I never said they had to be free
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My apologies. i jumped to conclusions.
For my favorite movies,i need to rip and back then up to disk.
With an hyper independent toddler who scratches my disks, it's good to have a back up.

I would just suggest converting your own...

Pm sent man....

YOu don't have to download them "for the N1" You can use any movie you want and use Any Video Converter to convert them. There is an option to specify which device you're converting for and you can just select Nexus One and push convert. It's much easier than dealing with selecting the codecs and everything with other programs.

I've used doubleTwist to convert and sync some movies... but it takes FOREVER!!!

If you have enough cores and OCed then you can do other stuff while it encodes

britoso said:
If you have enough cores and OCed then you can do other stuff while it encodes
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Click to collapse
I have a lowly Intel Core2 Duo laptop with 3gb of RAM. Not amazing, but as law student, it's always been more than adequate. Anyway, converting and synching a gb of music from wma to mp4a, and a couple gb of avi to mp4 takes a couple of hours...
I think other converters can do this much faster, then I could just drag and drop straight to the SD card, since copying stuff with the card mounted in the phone is slower...
What would be great for doubleTwist, is if you could do the conversion without the phone connected to the computer (currently, it has to be plugged in the whole time), then synch later in a much shorter period of time. Maybe I should email them...

How to play dvd movies on the tf

I had a free download from one of my dvd movies. But it will not play on my TF. What app should I use?

And the award for "The Least Info Provided" goes to.........

In other words......There is not enough info to provide you with an answer.
If this "free" download is encoded with AC3 audio then its not going to play.
You could try looking in the 100 other threads dedicated to video problems and see if your problem matches an existing one.

sorry, was posting from my phone and didnt have the format avaiable. The format is .wma and i saved it to my sd card but still we not play. Tried the video app and mx video player.

The place you got the wmv, you may want to check to see if it has any DRM running on it. If its enabled DRM'd you maybe unable to given its current state.

it was from a direct link when i bought a bluray d8sc for a free download version so not sure about the drm.
Is ther a player that can decode wma? Tried searching with no results.

.wma is windows media audio format... Are you sure its the movie and not the soundtrack instead?

Yes, i used my desktop windows and i think it was the only option to download. It plays fine on my desktop thru the windows media player but not thru my tf.
CaNsa, enough info for you?

its probably drm protected as stated above, just like movies downloaded from itunes. the only way you will play it on the transformer would be to get a program that strips the drm off

i have never seen a wma file with video.. does it exist?
i have seen wmv with video and i am sure wma only carries audio

lordgodgeneral said:
its probably drm protected as stated above, just like movies downloaded from itunes. the only way you will play it on the transformer would be to get a program that strips the drm off
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If you decide to strip the drm off of it, be prepared to go to federal prison and have lots of ass-widening yoga classes.

goodintentions said:
If you decide to strip the drm off of it, be prepared to go to federal prison and have lots of ass-widening yoga classes.
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It's perfectly legal to make a backup or duplicate file or DVD so long as you don't turn around and resell it and it's for personal use only.
EDIT: So it's illegal to copy a DVD? Interestingly, no. Judges have said that consumers have a right to copy a DVD for their own use—say, for backing it up to another disk or perhaps watching it on another device, such as an iPod. That's the same "fair use" rule that made it legal to tape television shows for watching later, perhaps on a different TV. The problem is that consumers can't duplicate DVDs without software tools that get around the copy protection on those disks. It is those tools that Congress outlawed.
EDIT: Had to partially edit my post as I was partially correct. Sorry about that goodintentions.

AcIdC0R3 said:
The problem is that consumers can't duplicate DVDs without software tools that get around the copy protection on those disks. It is those tools that Congress outlawed.
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Yup, although it depends on where you live, of course. We in the US have some of the dumber restrictions, such as those you mentioned. It's legal to copy DVDs for personal use...the tools that will perform the decryption, however, aren't.
Personally I believe it's every citizen's duty to defy unjust laws, so I make tons of copies of my DVDs.

rickatnight11 said:
Personally I believe it's every citizen's duty to defy unjust laws, so I make tons of copies of my DVDs.
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Your not alone, I feel the same way.

From an ethics perspective there's no difference in downloading and sharing. The other leechers could be doing the same thing you are.
From a prosecution standpoint it leaves your vulnerable, which is why off-shore VPNs, private trackers, and other protective means are useful.

rickatnight11 said:
It's faster for me to download a digital copy than copy it from the media myself.
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Wow, you must have some kind of wonderful on download speed because I can rip and burn or rip and transcode in just under 20 minutes. I like to rip my own movies that way I know and can control exactly what I'm getting. I've tried torrenting movies but then I'm getting some copy in PAL format and hard subtitled in Russian or Swahili or something. It's really annoying.
If you really want a good movie to download I would suggest a straight rip from a Blu-ray but the size is anywhere from 35gb to 50gb in size and can take a hellacious amount of time to download, especially if there aren't a lot of seeders and there harder to come by too.

AcIdC0R3 said:
Wow, you must have some kind of wonderful on download speed because I can rip and burn or rip and transcode in just under 20 minutes. I like to rip my own movies that way I know and can control exactly what I'm getting. I've tried torrenting movies but then I'm getting some copy in PAL format and hard subtitled in Russian or Swahili or something. It's really annoying.
If you really want a good movie to download I would suggest a straight rip from a Blu-ray but the size is anywhere from 35gb to 50gb in size and can take a hellacious amount of time to download, especially if there aren't a lot of seeders and there harder to come by too.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was actually thinking about Blu-Ray, when I quoted that, which takes some time to encode (plus I trust the encoding skills of release groups way more than my own). While a DVD doesn't take long to encode anymore, it's still way quicker to download them on my FIOS connection.
I've downloaded quite a few Blu-Ray rips, but honestly there's no noticeable difference in quality, when compared with an x264-encoded .mkv, especially when viewing across the room on an HDTV. Sometimes I end up reencoding those (or redownloading another version) for space purposes.

thebadfrog said:
In other words......There is not enough info to provide you with an answer.
If this "free" download is encoded with AC3 audio then its not going to play.
You could try looking in the 100 other threads dedicated to video problems and see if your problem matches an existing one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
really? i could be mistaken, but im pretty sure ac3 works for me just fine. i download movies with adownload from btjunkie and watch them all the time on dice player, and most of them say AC3 encoded. ive never run accross any format that i havnt been able to play yet.

sonami said:
really? i could be mistaken, but im pretty sure ac3 works for me just fine. i download movies with adownload from btjunkie and watch them all the time on dice player, and most of them say AC3 encoded. ive never run accross any format that i havnt been able to play yet.
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Then you have the only trasnsformer that plays high profile 720p + with ac3 audio encoding