Multimedia transcoding applications, motorola Xoom

[meton_magis]

So I just got a Motorola Xoom. I'm wanting to load some movies onto it to watch when I'm out and about, but I don't have any idea where to begin. On my computer, I just use VLC or Mplayer, and it'll play whatever I throw at it. On the Xoom, not so much.

It runs on an Nvidia Tegra 2. I've been trying to find what codecs the hardware and android supports, but I'm only finding what it doesn't support (or some apple fan talking about how his ipad is so much better .....).

Does anyone have any idea what these things can run?

The second question I have, is what are some good transcoding apps? I haven't done any in the past, so I don't have any insight into what works well. I'm on Fedora 14 primarily, but I can install whatever distro on some spare disk space, so that's not really critical.

[HROAdmin26]

Google for page with 'Xoom codec support'

And this Motorola XOOM is also a great media player which supports a lot of media formats including files with MP4, WMV, H.264, H.263 as video format and MP3, WAV, AAC+, WMA as audio format.

Handbrake is a top transcoder. Googling for "handbrake xoom profile" returns this link.

[meton_magis]

I'll check it out. thanks.

[nujinini]

For what i's worth, I use ffmpeg (CLI) to transcode my videos and sound converter (GUI) to transcode music.

dvdbackup (CLI) & dvdrip (GUI) to backup dvds

[meton_magis]

I've been doing a lot of tinkering with ffmpeg, and handbrake to try to learn all this stuff, but there I'm only just getting a basic overview of codecs.

I'm going to do more this weekend, and will hopefully post more when I get it figured out, so that future people will have something to look at.

The biggest problem I have, is that most of my videos are in xvid format. The nvidia tegra2 supports hardware decoding of that, but the xoom itself doesn't with just bare android. I'll need to look into if I can actually access the hardware with market apps.

For now, handbrake's baseline x264 mode works pretty good for android. I've been throwing that, and the original mp3 stream into an MKV container, and it plays (or copy the aac, or transcode into vorbis if it isn't mp3).

I'd prefer to use ffmpeg, because my files are on a headless server, and the command line would help, so I need to learn more ffmpeg switches to tweak the profiles.

I'm trying to avoid transcoding, because I allready have highly compressed xvid videos, and transcoding degrades them even worse. When I have an x264 encoded video, copying the stream exactly usualy works OK, but I have very few videos in the format. I may have to end up doing so, just to make it work, but I'm not done yet researching.

The other issue is that the tegra does not include the neon instructions that are usually on ARMs. Most hardware decoding (if I understand right) goes through the neon instructions, so anything to decode on tegra would have to be specific to it.

thanks for the help so far guys.

[Rubberman]

I use ffmpeg to transcode videos to mp4 format to run on my Nexus One Android (Gingerbread) phone. It should work just fine for your Xoom as well.

[meton_magis]

I think I've settled on transcoding my videos. It's not the best method, but I think it's the best available, at least for now.

I'll probably use ffmpeg since I can do that on a headless server, and let it run while I'm sleeping. Handbrake requires too much manual intervention, and you have to queue up the encodes 1 at a time ... blech.