Ashamed of Mpeg-4
I tried to encode some videos to MP4-SP with the intention that they would work with the iPod, mp4-capable cellphones (e.g. the latest Symbian ones) and the PSP. No cake. Each one of these use their own version (or part) of mpeg4 and so they are not really compatible with eachother. I tried a gazillion front-ends and backends and encoders and muxers, but none creates a universally accepted MP4-SP format. Even the highly acclaimed ‘PSP Video 9′ utility produced an SP-CBR MP4 video that won’t even play on PSP’s latest firmware. I am ok with the differences between the XviD and MP4-SP formats, but when you have incompatibilities between the supposedly same kind of MP4-SP format, that really pisses me off. And it’s all the MPEG Groups’ fault for allowing their licensees to take apart the standard and only implement bits and pieces as they see fit, resulting in this shameful incompatibility. Who wants to have a different copy of the same video for their iPod, their PSP and their cellphone? Transcoding a movie takes about 1.5 hours! Imaging having to do that 3 times.
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And i though something was wrong with the encoder or my cell, now i know why, trying to encode video in mp4, didn’t work out.
I have a PSP. I bought it thinking I could “rip” my own DVD’s to a memory card and watch them. What a hassle! Like you say, it takes forever to encode. And when you are done (at least in my case), you wind up with separate files. Very clunky. And the video wasn’t that good. I finally went out and bought a UMD movie. Very slick, very high-quality. Oh well!
Try MediaFork if you have a dual-core machine. Transcoding a movie to mp4 happens in 3x real time on my 2.8 GHz Pentium D.
I tried Handbrake, it does not do Letterbox.
It is funny that the only UI that I really like for an encoder is Quicktime’s. Too bad Quicktime’s encoder is extremely slow and of worse quality.
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