The 32G CF I ordered just got delivered. I'd forgotten how large CFs are. But more to the point, it turns out the iPaq can hold one CF and one SD at the same time, and use them both. So the SD I already had will continue to be of use. That gives me 64G of storage, should I need it.

Since a CF has a parallel interface, is it faster than SD, which is serial? I'm guessing that the answer is "not significantly" because the limiting factor is the speed of the memory chips.

UPDATE: And now to try to fill up some of that space. Wonderduck recommended AllToAVI and VirtualDub as ways of changing files to something I might be able to play.

VirtualDub looks like it understands a bazillion container formats, but MKV is conspicuous by its absence. AllToAVI does understand that one but it seems that it wants to make two passes. But let's see how it goes.

UPDATE: I may be forced to actually read the documentation for AllToAVI (gasp!). I'm using the first episode of RealBout High School as a test, mainly because it was ripped from the R1 DVD and has two audio and three subtitle tracks plus being narrow screen.

The first two times I tried converting it, the conversion process bailed out half way through. Oddly, it didn't give me any error message; it just quit. The resulting fine played fine, except that the audio and video were hugely out of sync.

I decided that the problem was that I'd said it was 29.997 fps. So now I'm redoing it at 24.99etc fps and we'll see how it goes.

The good news? It got the right audio track and the right subtitle track and converted the subtitle to a hardsub, all of which is exactly what I want.

If I can get this one working, next is the first episode of Macademi Wasshoi. That one is wide screen, and I'll want to see if it works converting to 640*360.

UPDATE: AllToAVI is threaded and it is fully utilizing two of my four CPUs. It's still not very fast, but that's OK. It's set up to make batch conversions possible, so I could set it up in the evening and let it run overnight.

UPDATE: The way it looks now is that the reason you have to make two passes is that the first one is about simplification. The output remains H.264, but the way I'm setting it up, the output has hard subs and a single audio file. Then you process that one again through the program, and this time you can change the codecs.

It reminds me of the rabbit's digestive system.

I just recoded that other one, and the new file now shows as MPEG-4 (XviD) for video and MP3 for audio. And now to see if it'll play on the iPaq.

UPDATE: And it works beautifully with TCPMP. I think we have a winner.

One of the physical controls on the iPaq is an 8-way rocker switch. When I have the display in landscape mode and am running a video in TCPMP, then one direction on the rocker switch controls the volume. The other does 5-second skips forward or backward. The center button is play/pause.

Which is really nice, especially when you're in full screen mode.

UPDATE: So how much did the battery get drained by watching one anime episode? Beginning at 100%, when I was done it was 94%. Which means I could watch hours of video without running out of battery power. (Assuming that the readout is linear.)

And since the file I played was 200 MB, I could fit many hours of video on the 32G SD.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 10:58 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 625 words, total size 3 kb.