PocketDivXEncoder Help

Help

Note :
This help is included into the program : you can view it by clicking on the "Help" button, then on "Detailed Help".

Help index

1 - Source file selection

File to encode

Subtitles selection

Video information

3 - Main settings

Video quality

Audio Quality

Brightness / Sharpness / Contrast

Volume

Video size

Cutting the video

Preview mode

Direct Encoding

Add to the task list

4 - Encoding tasks management

Open a list

Save a list

Delete a task

Delete all

Encode all

5 - Post-encoding misc options

Correct Audio/Video sync

Play an encoded file

6 - Advanced options

Handled device selection

Orientation

Max resolution

Direct Audio/Video Stream Copy

B-Frames

2-pass encoding

De-Interlace

VHQ

No Audio

Framerate

IVTC - Inverse Telecine

XviD

Normalize audio

Live effect

Save settings / Restore settings

7 - Video information

Video stream information

Audio stream information

8 - Help section

Readme

FaQ

Changelog

My email address

Special Thanks

Add a right-click menu

Uninstall

Default language

Font/Size/Charset for subtitles

9 - FAQ

What is the aim of this program

How can I make a DVD copy with this software

What are the software requirements for PocketDivxEncoder

When playing a file on my PC, there are some artifacts on the video

I don't know how to play movies on my Palm/PocketPC/Smartphone

The clip is stretched / flipped upside-down

Your program made my computer crash

OK, I understand but why does my computer crash when I use PocketDivXEncoder

When I encode a file without checking the "XviD" box, the output file still uses the XviD codec

I want to submit a bug / a suggestion / I want to receive the source code

You do so many English mistakes, I can't even understand what you are saying

When I hit the "Encode" button, a window appears then immediately disapears and nothing is encoded...

PocketDivxEncoder is freeware, distributed under the GPL license. It allows anyone to encode a video file with parameters optimized for viewing on a PocketPC, a Palm, a Smartphone, a Personal Video Player (Archos, etc...) or any other portable device (landscape mode, low CPU usage, increased brightness, ...). PocketDivXEncoder is based on "MEncoder" taken from the MPlayer project. Currently PocketDivXEncoder can encode video clips in 2 formats : XviD or FFMpeg. It will not actually write a Divx encoded file as XviD and Ffmpeg give more quality. You don't need any codec installed on your computer in order to use PocketDivXEncoder as they are built into the main executable. For PocketPC, Palm or Smartphone users, you will have to download the TCPMP player and install it on your handled device.

In this file, you will find some detailed informations about all the features that PocketDivXEncoder offers.

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1 - Source file selection

This option allow you to select the input file that will be encoded for your handled device.

File to encode :

If you want to encode a video clip, just select it by clicking on the following button :

TIP !

You can select several files at the same time in order to encode them with the same parameters. You just have to :

click on the button

The selection file window appear.

Click on each file you want to select and maintain the "Ctrl" button pressed.

Subtitles selection :

If you want to hardcode subtitles on your movie, you can use the button

. PocketDivXEncoder displays a dialog box in order for you to choose any subtitle you want to encode with your video file.

TIP !

You can change the subtitles font and size in the "Help" section of PocketDivXEncoder.

Video information :

The following button

displays some useful information on your input movie file and on your operating system. For more information on this option, just go to the "Video information" section.

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2 - Output file

Output file :

If you want to choose a non-default file name or file path, you can click on this button :

. By default, PocketDivXEncoder will use the same path as the input file and the same name as the input name with the "_DeviceType.avi" suffix.

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3 - Main settings

In this section, you will be able to set some useful parameters for your output video file.

TIP !

If you don't understand the aim of these parameters, you can use the default values : they have been chosen as the best compromise for your device.

Video quality :

this option allows you to modify the quality of the resultant video stream. The larger the number (moving the slider to the right) the better the quality but also the larger the size of the resultant file.

WARNING !

For high-resolution capable devices (VGA), if you decide to encode your movie to a high resolution (e.g. 640x480), you will need to use a very high quality value (more than "80") otherwise, the bandwidth will be too small for the huge amount of bit spent by the VGA pictures. Thus your output video file will spend a lot of hard-drive space(nearly 1 GB for a 1:45 video file)...

Audio Quality :

this option is similar to video quality but for the audio stream which will be contained in the new file. There are 2 ways to enter this : a simple mode with a slider which works as the video slider does. The further to the right it is pushed the better the quality of the resultant audio stream but also the larger the file will be.

TIP !

To the left of the audio quality control is a small >. Pressing this will display specific controls which replace the audio quality slider with these 3 fields you may control the frequency, sample rate and stereo/mono settings for the audio.

The frequency setting : Frequency is the measurement of the number of audio samples stored per second of audio. The frequency is measured in hertz (Hz). 44100 Hz means that 44100 sound samples are stored per one second of audio.

The bitrate setting : It is the number of bits stored for one second of sound.

Mono / Stereo : I think you know what this mean...

TIP !

An estimation of the completed file size is also displayed for reference but remember that this is only an estimation of the actual size when encoding is completed : in fact, it's impossible to predict exactly which amount of bandwidth will be used when encoding as the bitrate may vary during the encoding process.

Brightness / Sharpness / Contrast :

These parameters allow you to improve the brightness, contrast, or to do some kind of color enhancements.

Volume :

With this option, you can raise the volume of the audio track.

Video size :

There is also a change button

which brings up a dialog allowing you to match the size of the generated video to the physical size of the device upon which it will ultimately be played. This way of resizing/cropping could be a little confusing at first see, but it seems to be the most intuitive way of changing your movie's parameter because it is the only way that allows you to see exactly how your movie will be rendered on your device. How this works :

Click on the "RESIZE" button on the main form

Resize your movie with the left or right slider until it looks exactly as you want it to look when you will play it on your device. Don't worry if the movie overpass the device's screen : the borders that are outside the device's screen will be automatically cropped. If you see an indication such as "320/368", this means "Your movie will be resized to 368 and cropped at 320 in order for it to fit into your device screen".

If there are some remaining black borders on your movie, just crop them with the four arrow in the middle of the window in order not to waste bitrate by encoding these black borders. Your device will automatically add black borders and you will have gained some space.

Click the "Validate" button. It's done !

The "keep aspect ratio" option allows you to resize your movie without distording the picture.

The gray arrows in the middle will allow you to "crop" the picture, that means to cut off the black borders of your video clip.

TIP !

It is often a good choice to choose some values that can be divided by "16" as it's the standard size of a DivX block.

TIP !

If your output video clip laggs or if it is playing jumpy on your device, then you should choose some smaller dimensions.

WARNING !

Some people think that the bigger the picture is, the better. That's not true ! For example, if you encode some video clip at 320x240 and at 640x480 with a bitrate of "400", you will see that your 640*480 movie quality is worse than the 320x240 one :

If you encode a movie at "320x240" with the quality setting set to "24", you will use 400 kbit/s for storing 76.800 pixels, which is OK.

If you encode a movie at "640x480" with the quality setting set to "24", you will use 400 kbit/s for storing 307.200 pixels, which is not enough !

That's why a quality value of "20" will be enough for a 320x240 movie, whereas you will need a quality value of "80" for a 640x480 movie in order to obtain a correct result.

TIP !

If you want to create a movie that will play in fullscreen without any black border and without having the picture stretched :

Cick on the "Change" button

Raise the video size until you don't see any black border in the device screen. The video window may go past the screen of the device, but don't mind.

Save changes and here you are : the left and right borders of your video clip may be cut, but in most cases, this is not a big deal.

Cutting the video :

it allows the removal of unwanted video from both the beginning and the end of the video. When this mode is enabled (by clicking on the appropriate button

) a simplified video player is displayed allowing you to select both the beginning and end of the video to include in the new video file. There is a slider allowing slewing through the video in much the same way as the media player allows. You press the Mark as Beginning and Mark as end buttons in order to describe the start and end of the desired video.

Preview mode :

this option does a real encoding (with all the settings set) of the file with one difference : it only encodes 10 seconds... The preview function primarily helps people who want to see what the video will look like with the settings they have chosen.

TIP !

The 10 seconds are randomly chosen from the movie and this random part changes every time you click on the preview button...

Direct Encoding :

Click this button if you want to launch the encoding process with the settings you just chose.

Add to the task list :

Click on this button if you want to add the encoding task you just set up to a batch list. This will allow you to encode your jobs later, for example during the night.

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4 - Encoding tasks management

The task list is a batch queue of sorts which allows queueing up of encoding jobs to be run at a later time. You select the files to encode as well as the settings for the specific file and press Add to List. At this point the settings as they currently exist are added to the queue and will actually be executed later.

There are buttons at the top right side of the main dialog that allow loading and saving the task list as well as removing a specific entry and clearing all of the list.

Open a list :

Opens a batch list file previously saved with PocketDivXEncoder :

Save a list :

Saves the current batch list :

Delete a task :

Removes the selected task from the batch list :

Delete all :

Delete all the tasks from the batch list :

Encode all :

When you press the encode all button the queued jobs will be executed one by one (

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5 - Post-encoding misc options

Correct Audio/Video sync :

This option will speed up the video or the audio stream and will try to obtain an audio and a video stream of the same length :

Play an encoded file :

Cette option permet de lire un fichier qui vient d'être encodé avec PocketDivXEncoder. Pour cela, cliquez sur ce bouton :

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6 - Advanced options

These advanced options are aimed at advanced users : if you don't know what they mean, you'd better use the default settings. You can modify them by clickin on the following button :

TIP !

If you want to know more about the aim of a specific option, just read this help (of course

) or you can also place your mouse pointer over the option and a help bubble will appear.

Handled device selection :

This option allows users to indicate on which device the output file will be played. Then the program will select the optimal dimensions for the resultant video.

Orientation :

This option is only available for PDA or Smartphone devices. It allows users to choose which pre-rotation they want to apply to the output clip. This will allow the fast desktop to do the rotation rather than the much slower pocket device.

Max resolution :

This option is only available for VGA compatible devices.

If you want to play the output clip on your handled device, just choose a "Medium résolution".

If you want to play the output clip on your TV or computer, just choose a "High resolution".

If you want to play the output clip on your Plasma monitor or on your videoprojector (lucky guy ), just choose a "Medium resolution".

Direct Audio/Video Stream Copy :

The resultant video file will contain the audio/video stream just as it was represented in the original (without recompressing).

B-Frames :

add bidirectional frames to the video created. B-Frames tend to increase the quality of the video and also decrease in the size of the resultant file.

2-pass encoding :

this improves the image quality a little bit, but it slows the encoding process. The first pass, the encoder detects high motion scenes (scenes with action). Then at the second pass, it uses much more bandwidth to encode high motion scenes than low motion ones. It normally is used in order to remove blocky jerks in the video picture in action scenes.

De-Interlace :

If the video is interlaced this option will generate a progressive scan video from the interlaced source. Simplistically take a video which has every other line in each frame and make a video which has all of the lines in each frame. This should increase the quality of the resultant video. Example :

VHQ :

A more complex encoding algorithm which results in Better picture quality, but takes more time to encode. The quality differences are generally worth it.

No Audio :

the resultant file will not have any audio track at all.

Framerate :

you can specify manually the number of frames per second you want in the output file. The smaller the framerate the smaller the resultant file will be. Remember that the lower frame rates may result in choppy video for faster moving scenes.

TIP !

Consider using smaller values for framerate if your movie plays "jumpy" on your handled device. A value between 15 fps and 30 fps is often a good choice.

IVTC - Inverse Telecine :

Telecining simplistically is a scheme to re-sample a film video which is shot at 24 frames per second and convert it to 29.97 frames per second to be played on a tv. IVTC effectively reverses this process. There is much information on www.doom9.org which further describes this operation.

XviD :

encode the output video in the xvid video format. If this is not selected the video will be encoded in the FFMpeg format.

Normalize audio :

If you check this option, the volume of the audio track will be ajusted in order to lower differences between loud (explosions, etc...) and silent (dialogs, etc...) scenes.

Live effect :

This option creates a "live" effect by increasing the differences between the left and right channels in Stereo sound.

Save settings / Restore settings :

I think that this one is easy to understand...

TIP !

How to always open PDE with the same parameters :

Save your own parameters

Create a shortcut to the settings file on your desktop instead of a shortcut to the main PDE executable.

When you open PocketDivXEncoder, your settings are automatically loaded.

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7 - Video information

A video file is a container which is composed by at least 2 streams : a video stream and an audio stream. Sometimes, there are some extra streams (subtitles, extra audio streams, etc...)

Several container types exist : for example, the "AVI" standard (Audio/VIdeo Interleaved), the "OGM" standard (Ogg Media), the "MKV" standard (Matroska) or the "MP4" standard.

Video stream information :

Compression : The compression algorithm used for encoding the video stream.

FourCC : A 4 character long ID that is different for each codec.

Width, Height : Picture dimensions.

Length : The total movie length

Framerate : The number of frames that are displayed in one second. It is usually between 15 and 30 fps.

Bitrate : It's the video stream bandwidth (in kb/s) : it determines how much bits are stored for one second of the video stream.

Pixels / second : Number of pixels per second. (= Height x Width x Framerate)

Audio stream information :

Compression : The compression algorithm used for encoding the audio stream.

Bitrate : It's the audio stream bandwidth (in kb/s) : it determines how much bits are stored for one second of the audio stream.

Canaux : The number of audio channels. (e.g. : 1=Mono, 2=Stereo, ...)

Streams : The number of audio streams contained in this file. Usually, when several streams are found, it means that your file contains several languages.

Frequency : Frequency is the measurement of the number of audio samples stored per second of audio. The frequency is measured in hertz (Hz). 44100 Hz means that 44100 sound samples are stored per one second of audio.

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8 - Help section

If you want to go to the help section of PocketDivXEncoder, just click on the above button.

Readme :

The Readme file of PocketDivXEncoder. You will find fewer information than in this doc

FaQ :

Frequently Asked Questions.

Changelog :

All the changes that have been commited to PocketDivXEncoder since the begining.

My email address :

Please, don't send me an email if the answer you are looking for is in this file. Suggestions, bug reports, congratulations, money and all other cool things are welcomed. If you encounter a bug, try to use the

button that appears at the end of the encoding process instead (it will give me more information on your bug)... Thanks !

Special Thanks :

With a freeware program, this page is very important : without the help of all these people, I couldn't have programmed PocketDivXEncoder.

Add a right-click menu :

If you click on this button

, a PocketDivXEncoder option will be added to the Windows context menu for video files. When you will right-click on a video file, you will be allowed to choose "Encode with PocketDivXEncoder".

Uninstall :

PocketDivXEncoder doesn't have any installation file, but it writes some parameters to the registry. If you want to erase these parameters, just click on this button :

Default language :

Here you will be able to choose a different language for the Graphical Interface. If you want to translate PocketDivXEncoder, just choose the "test" language, then you can modify the "test.ini" file created in your temp directory (usually "C:\Documents and settings\Username\Local Settings\Temp\test.ini"). Then please send it back to me and I will add your translation to the next PocketDivXEncoder version.

Font/Size/Charset for subtitles :

Here you can select some parameters for your subtitles, if you choose to hardcode subtitles on your encoded movie file.

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9 - FAQ

What is the aim of this program ?

PocketDivxEncoder allows you to encode video files with parameters that fit the capabilities of your specific handled device (PDA, Smartphone, Palm, Portable video players, DivX players).

How can I make a DVD copy with this software ?

This program doesn't help you to copy commercial DVDs because it is completely illegal ! I won't answer any questions about any illegal stuff, so don't ask.

What are the software requirements for PocketDivxEncoder ?

You have to install a recent version of DirectX (>9). If you don't know which version of DirectX is installed on your system, just run my program... If your version is out-of-date, it will display a warning. No other soft or codec is required to make PocketDivxEncoder work.

When playing a file on my PC, there are some artifacts on the video :

You need to play your movies with another software player : this problem can happen when rendering non-DivX (e.g. XviD or FFMPEG) movies with the DivX codec. Try using a player like MPlayer or VideoLanClient.

I don't know how to play movies on my Palm/PocketPC/Smartphone !

You need to download TCPMP and to install it on your Palm/PocketPC/Smartphone...

The clip is stretched / flipped upside-down !

...that's why I've implemented some resize and pre-rotate functions! You can change the rotation option by clicking on the PDA in the "Advanced options".

Your program made my computer crash !

This program is in its early stages of development, so it is possible it contains some bugs. I'm not responsible for any damage this program could cause to your computer. However, this program doesn't use any critical resource of the computer, so it is not likely to make it crash...

OK, I understand but why does my computer crash when I use PocketDivXEncoder ?

I'm sorry but I think it has something to do with your hardware : PocketDivXEncoder uses nearly 100% of your CPU, so the CPU is getting very warm during the process. The problem is often caused by a cheap CPU fan which is not sufficient... but it can be caused by a corrupted RAM component or something...

When I encode a file without checking the "XviD" box, the output file still uses the XviD codec :

The output file is not actually a XviD file but a FFMPEG file. However, in order the encoded files to work on the majority of PMP types, the FourCC (the field in the video file that describes the video codec) used when encoding with PDE is "XviD". That's why some software like Gspot wrongly assume that the video file is an XviD file whereas it's not.

I want to submit a bug / a suggestion / I want to receive the source code :

No problem, send-me a mail with a precise description of how the bug happened (if it is for a bug report)... Please, use the utilities provided to help me recreate the same bug on my computer : you can copy/paste the log that appears at the end of the encoding process for example ! Also tell me which software and version you use (for encoding AND playing movies...). Thanks a lot !

You do so many English mistakes, I can't even understand what you are saying !

Well... Sorry... I'm French and you know how bad we speak English... Sorry for that... Please, send-me a mail in order to correct my English mistakes !

When I hit the "Encode" button, a window appears then immediately disapears and nothing is encoded...

Windows XP data execution prevention causes massive problems in PocketDivXEncoder. To turn it off :
1. Right-click "My Computer" and select "Properties"
2. Go to the "Advanced" tab
3. In the "Performance" section, click the "Settings" button
4. Go to the "Data Execution Prevention" tab
5. Select the 2nd option ("Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select")
6. Click the "Add" button and find your PocketDivXEncoder program
7. Hit "Ok" and "Ok" again to close both windows.
(thanks to Andy on the Omniquiti forum for finding this ^_^)