Fantastic work on the wiki entry by the way, I browsed through it a while back, and looking at your edits now, the improvements you have made make a great difference to a noob like myself. Thanks!

That is some seriously good work there pete.

In the Anamorphic Video section, I added the PAL DVD resolution of 720x576 so as not to confuse those on PAL rather than NTSC.

I also retitled the "Downloadable Presets" to "Handbrake Downloadable Presets" in the Quick Guide. I still have an issue as to whether that particular Preset is indeed "Optimized for the N900" as I got a pretty poor result with it (Pillar Boxing and distorted video).

I also suggested some other 16:9 resolutions people could use if they wanted smaller file sizes.

How did you go with my settings ?

Not sure why you got a height of 272 ??
If you ticked the KEEP ASPECT RATIO before changing the Width to 640, you should have got a Height of 368 for a 1.78 Aspect Ratio DVD.


Have you tried the Downloadable Preset from the Wiki ? My results from that were pretty poor (pillar boxing and distorted picture). I would be interested to hear how others went with it.

I just realised, 272 would be the height for a 2.35 or 2.40 Aspect Ratio DVD given a width of 640 - what was the Aspect Ratio on that DVD ?

I was only using a Width of 640 to keep the file size down...... my eyes couldn't perceive a difference in the quality on a 1.78 AR source between files encoded at 800x448 and 640x368 (presumably scaled back up by the N900 and displayed as 800x448), hence I was going with 640 to minimise the file size. I haven't noticed any playback problems.


For a 2.35 Aspect Ratio video, I presume the N900 will display it as 800x352 with letterboxing. You could encode at 800x352 or again, for smaller file size, you could use 640x272. I suspect my poor eyes probably won't be able to perceive the difference.

hi ive tried a ton of different presets in handbrake, but none of the ones where i select h.264 work, the n900 gives me a 'media format not supported' error. if i leave all the settings the same, but switch the codec to 'mp4 (ffmpeg), it works fine.

any clues? i thought this device was the h.264 master?

Strange. I have encoded all mine with H.264 and had no problems.

Which version of Handbrake are you using ? Windows/Mac/Linux?

Have you tried using the iPhone & iPod Touch preset? That is basically what I use, with just some minor adjustments to the width (because iPhone is limited to only 480 wide).

btw.
I have tried with avidemux2 with different kind of settings and found that when ever i try to encode mp4 file video h.264 with mp3 the sound gets crippled. Only aac works. I do not know why, maybe it's frequency maybe channels or maby other 20 different things. I´m just wondering that in video encoding wiki it says that you can use with hadnbrake what ever you like "as you like it", so basically has someone really really tried all the different scenarios? Because if not then it´s safer to just tell exactly what you should put in there and avoid users asking here why the preset doesnt work.

..edit
Maybe its good to say that do not change presets audio settings.
Also link to this thread would be good.

Have you tried just following the Quick guide to get a working H264 MP4 file - i.e., not using the presets? I would be surprised if it didn't work, as that is what I am using. It is based on "Normal" profile that loads up when Handbrake loads.

The x264 options should be like this from the command line:

ref=4:bframes=0:subq=6:mixed-refs=0:weightb=0:8x8dct=0:cabac=0

Also make sure that the Modulus is set to 16.

Regarding the "as you like it": it shouldn't cause any problems with Handbake or the N900. You can leave it on Automatic and it will pick the first Audio track (usually English) and go for Dolby Prologic II in the mixdown. You can also add in Subtitles are you want. The reason I left them as optional was that the focus was getting a working H264 video, and the default AAC audio is picked automaticallt by Handrbake as best options. MP3 does work fine as well, and I have tried that in combination of H264+MP3 and Xvid+MP3.

Have you installed anything that could have scewed up Media Player? I had a lot of problems with H264 playback saying exactly what you are getting until I used Web Optimized; it won't play the exact same video file for me, unless that is how the MP4 was encoded.

@Zelig: yeah the movies I was doing were 2.35:1. I am trying to get a balance so I can watch on PS3 as well and not go searching in boxes for the DVDs, so I will probably keep the higher resolution. The size of the file doesn't bother me too much

Quick question, is it possible to play 700mb avi?

FREE: Win x DVD Ripper Platinum. (just for today)

Guys, head over to http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ and try todays software for ripping DVDs. I have tried a sample conversion and tested it on the N900 without changing or tweaking any of the settings and it was super quality.

The software must be installed today though. You can't download it today and install tomorrow.

If you want to try something other than Handbrake then try this. I will post some feedback after using it a little more.