Much Ado About Everything

On July 22, 2007 Intel executed massive price cuts on their entire processor line. I decided that enough is enough and finally bought myself one of those new processors. The best value for connoisseur right now is quad core chip – the Q6600. I even managed to get the new-as-of-July-16th G0 revision, but that’s a story for another day. The story for this post is about what can be done with such a power. Of course, I buy new hardware just because but there is one reason which does make sense – and that is video encoding.

Now comes the punchline – I am not a big fan of movies. That might be a shocking revelation to some of my friends. After all, my shelves are overflowing with 300 odd DVDs of all sorts and genres. Let’s not dwell upon this though as it’s yet another story for another time (why don’t I post these in my blog? Another story). The real question here is why would one want to encode video at all? If one owns original DVDs, one has no need for Divx, mpeg4 or whatnot, right? So why compress your content if you’re don’t have to?

Because you might want to watch your content on the go. Say, on an iPod or PSP or some lesser know (though probably more powerful) portable video device. Personally, I only need that when I’m traveling which is luckily only once or twice a year at most.

The other reason to do some video encoding is if you need to deal with a device that can’t play the content in its original format, such as PS3. This case may occur on a more regular basis and it might also require real-time (on demand) transcoding. It depends on what you’re trying to do. You might want to keep all of your content in one place, such as PS3′s hard drive. If your content is diverse or numerous, that may not be practical. In that case you might want to be able to stream your content from whatever storage server you have to your PS3.
As a media hub, a general purpose PC can’t be beaten. It can play just about anything and it can always be upgraded with software or hardware to do stuff it couldn’t do previously. There’s nothing more flexible than a general purpose computer. But a computer may not be the best ergonomic choice – a standalone player with its customized remote is almost always easier to use and faster to operate. Unfortunately, exactly because it’s customized, the standalone player is not going to be able to handle everything. That’s why it’d be good to have a PC that can transcode in real time, on demand into any format you need. A quad core surely can do it, can’t it?

Now you’re talking: this is the real reason for all this experimentation. I don’t really care whether PS3 can play an odd anime fansub Divx file I may have – whenever content I want is available to buy, I buy and since I demand the utmost quality possible I use BluRay or DVD or HD-DVD for my video fix anyway. I will just use the HTPC for the odd file and live with some inconvenience. It’s about the challenge and the “call of technology” – I want to feel the power of this processor and will invent a reason to stretch its legs, if necessary. And I want to learn how things work – that’s what drives me in life.

So with all that out of the way, let’s talk about the real thing – how to encode videos for PSP (or PS3). At their best, these things are using mpeg4. Using that container, with H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec you can achieve highest practical levels of compression at this time.
There’s the easy way and there’s the hard way. In part 1 I will talk about the easy way. The real fun stuff is in part 2, but that’s also where most of the frustration is as well. If you don’t need the aggravation, just take the easy way .

You run Windows – XP or Vista (maybe even 2000). You don’t know your codec from your container, let alone what’s DCT or a wavelet. You do know roughly what you need though – as in what file format you require. Lucky for you, you’re in majority.

Simply, download PS3 Video 9 and/or PSP Video 9. You are using official firmware for PSP, right? If don’t think it matters but I have never tried hacked firmwares and since we are now able to watch videos in full resolution, my only reason to ever try one doesn’t exist any longer. So, select convert, select current conversion and then click on “Convert Video”. Select your file, then select values for target device (PSP or PS3) and target format you want in the now-enabled combo boxes. Resolution of PSP screen is 480×272 so this is what you should select (for firmware 3.30+ of course, why would you run anything lower anyway?). Now click start… and that’s it. If you need to encode more videos at once – of course you do, this is for traveling, remember? – then simply repeat the procedure for other files which will queue them for processing. When it’s done, copy your files to PSP or PS3 – the program will even assist you with that – and you’re done.

There are some limitations. The obvious one is that I’m assuming you’re converting an existing video. That works well with downloaded content. But what if you want to encode something from a DVD? Then you’ll need to extract DVD to your hard drive first. That can be a simple process but it can also be pretty messy one in itself due to multiple video and audio streams present, various ads and extra features, various copy protection issues and so on. Luckily, this is nothing new and I’m sure there are plenty of guides on the web and plenty of software that will help you with this step. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a single program that would let you rip a DVD to a PSP or PS3 compatible file. I haven’t had a need to do this yet but I have tried for education’s sake to create a PSP/PS3 playable video from a DVD. This is from memory as it was done a while ago. I will summarize it below.

You can use a freeware program called DVD Shrink to extract your DVD to a single (or multiple) .VOB files. I heard some newer DVDs don’t work with DVD Shrink – supposedly you can use DVD Fab Decrypter. None of this is new or noteworthy, I’m just reporting what you can find with some Google search. But the trick to success which could make you hitting your head against the wall for days at end is this: make sure that .VOB file you rip to has only one audio stream. Otherwise your video and your audio will end up out of sync when encoded with PSP Video 9 (and probably most other software as it’s just the visual front end). As long as you end up with one video and one audio stream, you should end up with a good, useful encoding. Just be aware, in most countries it’s fine if you’re copying a DVD you own for you to watch on the go but this is considered a criminal activity – notably US. Yep, arranging a DVD you own to a different format to watch on the plane while away from home is a crime that depending on circumstances may be a “worse” offence than going to a bank armed with a gun to withdraw someone else’s money.

The other limitation is parameters of encoding. That is, you may end up encoding stuff at much higher (or lower) bitrates and quality settings than the content warrants. This especially applies if you’re re-encoding something (say a fansubbed episode of anime). You do have a fair bit of leeway here though as you can customize provided profiles to suit your needs. Of course, that means you’ll need to learn some things about H.264 codec. I will deal with that in part 2.

There is another way which I’ll still classify as “easy”. There is a very powerful application for Windows called meGUI which is a glorious front end/scripting program running on top of several famous raw processing engines. This application is very flexible and will give you close to a full control over encoding process but in a fairly user-friendly way considering the alternatives. There is no need for me to go over its usage as help – as in detailed guides with hand-holding – is provided within it. Given the example above, it would take the ripped movie (providing instructions as to how to rip them), guide you through interactive determination of its size, aspect ratio and frame rate (e.g. in order to cut off black bars present in most DVD video because encoding them would be a waste), guide you through separately encoding audio and video – providing you with the opportunity to select one of many preset profiles that will likely suit your every need as well as be compatible with your desired device, be it PSP or an iPod. It will also let you tweak each and every encoding option if you know what you’re doing, as well as let you create (AVI)Scripts which would let you script various pre-processors, scalers, filters, deinterlacers and whatnot. So whether you needs are complicated but common – in which case you’ll have to perform many steps but you’ll have guides to lead you every step of the way – or you know what you’re doing but don’t want to waste productivity on doing everything manually – you stand a good chance of getting best or close to best results possible with the least amount of aggravation, using meGUI.

There are more limitations. Software you are using may not be using all the power of your hardware. It will not take the advantage of 64-bit instructions and it’s Windows only. If you want to do things the simple way in Linux, you should get VMWare player (which is free) and install Windows and run it as a virtual machine. You will lose some performance – and unless you buy the higher versions you won’t be able to use advantage of your multi-core processor either. You also have no control over how the programs you use were compiled – they may be quite suboptimal and not take advantage of advanced instruction sets or even multiple cores. Ironically, likely due to their popularity and huge number of users, in practice it looks like the situation is actually better than if you were to do everything yourself! For example, applications are already patched to deal with bugs or performance improvements afforded by new hardware, which is something the “official” source code may not incorporate and might not do so for a long time!. I discuss that in part 2.

In summary, between PSP (PS3) Video 9 and meGUI, most users will be able to do all they need to, whether they want a (close to) one click solution or they know what they’re doing. The best thing is, most of these programs work given normal usage patterns and if they don’t, a lot of people will complain and then someone will fix it.