I have been experimenting with trying to get a DVD onto the N900. It is my own made DVD so doesn't have any copyright but have tried several options and settings with the Handbrake software but haven't managed to have the N900 play it.

Is there some specific file type and settings that I need to ensure so that the N900 will play it?

You've got a couple of options with the new handbrake.

If you're just targeting stock codecs, you'll need to use mp4 containers (and remember to turn on the web extensions if you're going to stream!). Inside that you can use the basic divix mode, but it's much better to use h.264.

Start with the iphone profile and then make a few tweaks to take advantage of the n900's extra power.

1) You can raise the number of ref frames to 4 safely, and probably 5.

2) You won't need to scale down the video to iphone resolutions, but you will need to resize, because the default media player can't handle non-square pixels (which is what all DVDs have).

Resize 4:3 DVDs to 640x480. For 16:9 DVDs, it's a little trickier. You can expand them to 848x480 (or 1024x576 for PAL) but that's higher than native. I'd suggest 800x448 which is what the media player will use anyway.

3) For bitrate, you have two choices. If you're only going to use the files off a memory card or the internal memory, then use constant quality mode and use something around 20. If you're going to stream the file, you will be limited by the media player's broken buffering. In my tests, I found that a the overall rate (audio + video) must be around 1Mbit/s at the most. After subtracting audio (assuming 128kbps), that leaves 865 for video. So use fixed rate at 865 with two pass to make the most of what you've got.

4) For audio, transcode to aac.

5) If you're using the extra codec pack, then you can use mkv containers and keep ac3 audio tracks, but those will be decoded with the cpu, wasting battery, and you won't get surround sound, so it's pretty pointless.

Hope that helps

http://mediautils.garage.maemo.org/tablet-encode.html

might help

Thanks Philipl and R-R.

R-R I couldn't see a download link from your url. Am i missing it or something?

I see that the date on the webpage is 2007. I suspect it may be missing the best settings for the N900...

I agree that that page referenced is for the older tablets. I remember from back then.
Also, someone else referenced the N900's extra power. What exactly is this? From what I have read it uses the same processor as the iPhone. I do not ask facetiously. I do want to know if indeed the N900 has hardware that is superior in some way.

The latest version was released in November and features an N900-specific preset with very high bitrate and full 800x480 encoding.

Ripping a DVD to the best possible quality and putting it directly on the N900 is a case of:

The problem with the phrase "ideal" is what your criteria are: quality, encoding time, file size, ... :-)

[QUOTE=Jaffa;429705]
Ripping a DVD to the best possible quality and putting it directly on the N900 is a case of:

[QUOTE]

Ok, I am a windows man so what, how, where. Could you explain the above code. I think I have the gist of it but would be useful to clarify.

Is the code relying upon a dvd in the drive? How would I specifiy a specific file and where would that line of code be run from?

Windows, you need:

• mplayer & mencoder
• Perl

You unpack the tablet-encode tarball and the basic usage is:

To get a list of presets and help:

Command Prompt. Yes, instead of an input file on the above, you can use dvd: to mean "the DVD in the drive". It also features episode extraction for multiple title DVDs.

However, on Windows if you don't like the command line, you may be better off with Handbrake, Nokia's Internet Tablet Video Converter or Media Converter.

More info at: http://wiki.maemo.org/Video_encoding

Can you tell me more about where this "extra power" comes from? I am genuinely interested in this. A friend who is interested has asked what the big deal is, and if it does have some hardware superiority I'd like to be able to point it out.

[QUOTE=philipl;428415]

Start with the iphone profile and then make a few tweaks to take advantage of the n900's extra power.

1) You can raise the number of ref frames to 4 safely, and probably 5.
.....