does anyone know which setting will give me the best results…
I got the app to work great, the sound issue is all good now too (im not sure why the sound was out of sync the first time)
Im looking to get the highest quality results on this app so i can show it off to my friends :)

Aha, well this is an interesting one. There is a flag which gives most dramatic results is “-n”, which controls the minimum bitrate. The default is 12000, but you can try using “-n 24000” or even “-n 32000”.

There is a downside, however. The higher you take the minimum bitrate, the more chance you have of stuttering in the video, when the ARM9 CPU cannot keep up with the video data.

What someone could do for us all is test out different minimum bitrate values. Try something like 20000, 24000, 28000, 30000, etc… and see at what level you still get watchable results. Then post back the results to the forums, and I’ll sticky it as a guide to quality levels.

Also, you might want to try it on two different types of video. One with lots of motion and camera movement, and one without. The motion affects stuttering, and even at the default levels you will occasionally hear repeated audio when the ARM9 can’t keep up.

interesting… ill try a few things and post my finding here in this thread

Looking forward to it,

Also, would dsvideo work any better with a RAM expansion pack?

now that there is a good idea!!! can something be done to get better results with the ram pack?

ok i’ve done some testing… and here are the results:
the video quality gets higher as you set the minimum bits per frame higher and higher… but as Nick sayd before… the sound does start to jump… and kinda lag on and off… dont get me wrong… its still watchable… but the sound isn’t smooth once you pass the 45000 bits per frame… i tryed the 12000 24000 48000 and 70000 on a rock music video and found that by 48000 the sound was starting to lag at some points of the video but it would return good in a second…. at 70000 the sound was doing this every 3 seconds… so that would make watching a video pretty annoying… I’ve also tested some south park episodes and the sound was ok at the 32000 minimum… plus its a cartoon so you don’t need much video for that… currently im trying a whole movie on 30000 bits per frame minimum… and ill let you guys know what happens…
But as of now… go with something arround the 30000 bits per frame minimum…
specify with “-n 30000” thats the command…
I would like to hear form others their tests and findings so dont be affraid to leave your test results here :]
untill then…see ya

No, unfortunately the ram pack won’t make any difference. The decoder is entirely limited by the CPU, and only needs around 500kb to run (most of the ram available on the DS isn’t currently used).

is it possible to do this
dsvideo output -n 24000 input -x 30000 in the same line
and if so would this give me a encode between 24000 to 30000
or does it not work like that

ekolimits: Thanks for the testing, and the information is roughly inline with what we were expecting, based on our own encode tests during development. You can effectively say that “-n 32000” is like a High Quality mode.

magenta: Yes, you can use -n and -x together to define lower and upper limits on bit rate.

dsvideo -n 24000 -x 30000 input.avi

I’m not sure how good the results will be with such a low maximum bitrate value, but this makes the encoding behave more predictably in terms of resulting file size, like fixed bitrate encoding. In fact, if you made both -n and -x values the same, it would be fixed bitrate.

ok i just tested a full length Bourne Ultimatum DVD on DSvideo and got great results at 30000 minimum bit rate ! I do find it interesting that you can set a fixed bit rate and it is probably true that 32000 bits per frame are the best quality without loosing out on sound… The movie moves fast, Its bourne of course the action is there so that tested the video… which passed with flying colors!!!! Im thinking of putting a youtube video of DSvideo in action playing this movie cause it looks and sounds great!!! the only thing is the volume is not loud enough… can you guys implement a volume amplyfier… something like moonshell where it will output sound at at least 400x what the natural sound is… the quality goes down and i know that but that feature is definately useful because of movies like the on i tryed where i couldnt hear much…
the movie was about 700 MB and it got converted to 400 MB at minimum 0f -n 30000 so thats goodresults
by the way, maybe if the converter could encode with a magnification of the sound… but i think it would be better for the app to handel that…

something interesting i noticed…
i converted a file thats longer than 2 hours and the dsvideo does not display the finish time… it tells me the durration below the file name but not below the progress bar…

Hmm I remember a bug in early beta where you couldn’t seek past a certain point in the video, which turned out to be the 65535th frame, and it was due to an overflow bug. This is possibly related. 65535 frames is roughly 90 minutes.

nah, the movie is there completely encoded and viewable… its just the time doesnt show on the bottom…

65535th frame? So the frame counter is an unsigned int value. I would recommend using unsigned long value which has a limit to 4294967295 :D

Well that bug got fixed very early in closed beta testing, but there’s a chance it’s related.

if you want more movies just buy like 3 2gb cards thats 2500mb of video that like the whole harry potter line or every game ever made from 1970’s – 1980’s