Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Full res, feature-length film playing off iPod Shuffle


I... I mean a friend of mine, ripped a feature length DVD to the H.264 format, and then transferred the resulting (800mb) file to an iPod shuffle. This is a picture of the movie playing, full speed, full resolution (and I mean full resolution. It looks good) off the iPod Shuffle. This movie is playing over USB.

I did the encoding using Hand Brake for OS X. The only kink in the whole thing is that a good 2-pass encoding from DVD to H.264 took almost 9 hours on a G5. But this really reminds me of the first time I made mp3's out of one of my audio CD's (back in the dark ages) so I could listen to it on my computer without the disc... It's the beginning of something big.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

it's here: http://www.ipodlounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/first-looks-special-nyko-movie-player/

Wiley said...

hmmm... I was thinking more in terms of movie management ala iTunes. The player is immaterial. The ideal player is still a TV.

Will S. said...

A friend of mine experimented with this and 2 pass encoded a full res movie to H.264 in about 2 hours. Of course he first ripped the dvd using Mac the Ripper. Did your friend rip straight from the DVD? That I can see taking a while if it had to also decode the encryption. Also, did your friend set your average bitrate to the default 1000 kbps?

Wiley said...

I ripped it.. I mean my friend ripped it straight from the DVD to h.264 using handbrake, so it's the decss stripping as well as the h.264 encode. I set the default bit rate to 1000 kbps, but I probably could have gotten away with 800 if I wanted to squeeze another movie on the iPod.

Will S. said...

My friend forgot to change the settings and ended up with the MPEG-4 codec instead of the H.264. Oops, it looks like it does take about 8-9 hours.

Anonymous said...

Apple's own HD gallery feature 480p content ~250 bitrate and the 720p stuff is ~800, Handbrake's default 1000 is a bit overkill and in my own experiments cranking it down to 500 for orig 720x480 DVD source keeps the H.264 looking purdy and the filesize manageable.

Wiley said...

500 seemed a little artifact-y to me, at least in dark areas. I do agree that 800 is really about as good as you need as long as you do a 2 pass.

Will S. said...

I am going to try a few different things with my copy of Eraserhead and see what gets a good result.

Anonymous said...

Eraserhead would be a good test because the blacks are so important to the film... if they get artifacts in them they would mess everything up.

Anonymous said...

This all very well and some impressive nerdy gobbledegook here but why would you want a film on your ipod shuffle in the first place? Its a bit like picking up radio luxembourg on the toaster! Ultimately annoying if you are trying to make some toast at the time!

Wiley said...

why would you want films on little plastic discs?

Wiley said...

I guess the point is, when you can get a high quality piece of video this small and at this low a bit rate, it's not hard to change out the mp3 playing chip in an ipod-like-device for a video playing chip, and the headphone jack for a dvi jack. Then instead of a dvd player and a bunch of discs, you get something that fits in your palm and holds all your movies.

and you don't end up worrying about crap like This.

The problem is that it takes a really long time to rip those movies off disc, and also the studios are incredibly tight assed about people freeing "their" movies from the media they come on.

That's why an online service for buying movies is the way it's going to be.

Will S. said...

A friend of mine made the same type of comment when I told him that I had tried that out. He said, "The iPod Shuffle is just a flash drive, I am not impressed." I had to explain that it wasn't the fact that the iPod was holding a file, but that the movie file whose file size should far exceed the capacity of the Shuffle is fitting in such a small space. He seemed a bit more interested, but not much, especially when I told him how long it took to encode. He replied that he will just continue to encode in Divx using ffmpegx.

Wiley said...

Yeah, encoding time is still pretty long for a two pass. I don't have the same problems encoding my own content in compressor, but I haven't done any 2 hour projects. Anything smaller than 20 minutes I would do one pass.