Tutorial - Encoding videos for the HP Touchpad webOS media player.

[ViciousXUSMC]

Hey everyone, new member and new touchpad owner. My first tablet got one simply due to the latest firesale on ebay.

When I got my device I wanted to transform it into an ideal portable media player. It seems that HP did not do a great job with the device as far as media support, especially video formats/codecs. However if you want to put the time and effort into it you can remedy the issue by encoding your files custom for the device.

I found no good tutorials for this anywhere on the net, every tutorial just says "download (buy) KalemSoft. Well not here! This is a real tutorial for real men!

I hope that its found useful by the community.

Watch on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ayiV9e23-4

[eblade]

Since I personally find video tutorials to be complete wastes of time, especially when we're usally talking about something that can be done by pasting a command line in a few seconds .. hopefully you won't mind my asking a few questions, since this is a topic you seem to be familiar with?

I'm currently wiring the VLC transcoder into my Subsonic media server, in this fashion:

vlc -q dummy %s :sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:standard{access=file,mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=-}vlc://quit

any suggestions for how one might improve it? i'm guessing that what this does, is it just takes the input file, and dumps it out as a H.264 encoded mp4, with 128kbit stereo 44khz audio, with the video unchanged. I'm going to need to find something a lot more flexible to be able to deal with setting various bitrates and stuff like that.

[NScott]

I watched the entire thing. Good work, just engaging enough to keep me interested while showing all the steps. Thanks.

[ViciousXUSMC]

Originally Posted by eblade

Since I personally find video tutorials to be complete wastes of time, especially when we're usally talking about something that can be done by pasting a command line in a few seconds .. hopefully you won't mind my asking a few questions, since this is a topic you seem to be familiar with?

I'm currently wiring the VLC transcoder into my Subsonic media server, in this fashion:

vlc -q dummy %s :sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:standard{access=file,mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=-}vlc://quit

any suggestions for how one might improve it? i'm guessing that what this does, is it just takes the input file, and dumps it out as a H.264 encoded mp4, with 128kbit stereo 44khz audio, with the video unchanged. I'm going to need to find something a lot more flexible to be able to deal with setting various bitrates and stuff like that.

You can not transcode without changing something so both your video and audio are being changed. I guess if your source is already H264 its possible that its just pass-through but I am highly doubting it. I am not a huge fan of transcoding the only time I would do it is for something like streaming to a device like the xbox360 or ps3 because they could not support the native version of my video collection, but I just spent the $100 for a WDTV Live so that I can plug all my stuff right in and never looked back now i have a 2TB HDD hooked to it to play local all my 1080P stuff and wireless stream anything 720P and under from my main pc.

A good high quality encode takes a LONG time, even with a powerful pc its not uncommon for it to be rendering at half the frame rate of the source thus it would not be possible to live stream/transcode at that setting and your forced to reduce the quality with more lax settings.

For the HP Touchpad I wouldnt go with any streaming as I may not have internet connection, for the home again I just use a WDTV Live and flashed a 3rd party firmware on there it supports everything and is much more trouble free and fully featured than having to mess with transcoding setups.

Originally Posted by NScott

I watched the entire thing. Good work, just engaging enough to keep me interested while showing all the steps. Thanks.

Hey thanks, I make entertaining videos (lets play) tutorials however (lets work) are hard to be entertaining

So I definitely focus much more on the information/teaching aspect and do not worry about being entertaining so much.

[levinite]

Originally Posted by ViciousXUSMC

Hey everyone, new member and new touchpad owner. My first tablet got one simply due to the latest firesale on ebay.

When I got my device I wanted to transform it into an ideal portable media player. It seems that HP did not do a great job with the device as far as media support, especially video formats/codecs. However if you want to put the time and effort into it you can remedy the issue by encoding your files custom for the device.

I found no good tutorials for this anywhere on the net, every tutorial just says "download (buy) KalemSoft. Well not here! This is a real tutorial for real men!

I hope that its found useful by the community.

Watch on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ayiV9e23-4?hd=1

The biggest problem I have with transcoding is loss of quality. If the original file is HD quality, why would one want to reduce it to 1024x768? You will probably not like the results when/if you touchpad is replaced with the 1920x1080 screen of the touchpad 3!
The touchpad can already play most files that have been properly encoded with H.264, including HD videos. In many cases the file does not need to be transcoded; a change of container [to mp4 or mov] and possible sound transcode will do. In addition, this is a very fast process compared to transcoding.
In short, it depends on the codec used in your source. If you have ripped dvds, then you will need to transcode them unless you use something like Kalemsoft player. But most HD material is already H.264.

[eblade]

It's not like you lose the original file when you transcode it, and there's not much point to carrying around extra gigabytes of data. And it sucks the CPU time to decode it, too. Also, live-streaming 1024kbit+ data is pretty much impossible. Knocking it down drastically in bit-rate is necessary to be able to stream . . and that's what i'm working on

I discovered that my above line was not actually working, and as a result my streamer was just dumping the original file. I do now have a working live-stream transcoding going on, but it's not in a format that the TouchPad understands, so I'm having to use TouchPlayer to play it back. meh. Hopefully we'll get some more official video codec support once we get the source codes. :| ... and my streamer server will get HTTP Live Streaming, which is already supported on the TouchPad.

[levinite]

Originally Posted by eblade

It's not like you lose the original file when you transcode it, and there's not much point to carrying around extra gigabytes of data. And it sucks the CPU time to decode it, too. Also, live-streaming 1024kbit+ data is pretty much impossible. Knocking it down drastically in bit-rate is necessary to be able to stream . . and that's what i'm working on

I discovered that my above line was not actually working, and as a result my streamer was just dumping the original file. I do now have a working live-stream transcoding going on, but it's not in a format that the TouchPad understands, so I'm having to use TouchPlayer to play it back. meh. Hopefully we'll get some more official video codec support once we get the source codes. :| ... and my streamer server will get HTTP Live Streaming, which is already supported on the TouchPad.

Live streaming is very possible if the file has the correct format. I have streamed 6000k+ bps streams with no problems. If you mean live transcoding, then the issue is mp4 files must be complete before streaming, at least with the tools I have. But there is a trick if your files are already properly encoded using H264. See TP mediatomb streaming.

[eblade]

OK, let me fix that. Live streaming to a remote connection at that rate is pretty much impossible. I hadn't even considered dumping it to a file, then catting the file to stdout. I guess that might work, although it might take forever and a day before it gets started, and the TouchPad might forget about the connection during that time. meh.

I think I'll just stick to using TouchPlayer until HTTP Live Streaming is implemented.. hopefully soon.

[levinite]

Originally Posted by eblade

OK, let me fix that. Live streaming to a remote connection at that rate is pretty much impossible. I hadn't even considered dumping it to a file, then catting the file to stdout. I guess that might work, although it might take forever and a day before it gets started, and the TouchPad might forget about the connection during that time. meh.

I think I'll just stick to using TouchPlayer until HTTP Live Streaming is implemented.. hopefully soon.

It doesn't take forever and a day since the files to be streamed already use the H.264 codec. To convert containers takes about 3 or 4 minutes for an entire 2hr HD movie. Compatible (.mov) files are played with no delay. It would automatically start to stream after it was converted. This all works with webOS 3.02 but as mentioned in the link, there are more issues since the last 3.04 update.

[ViciousXUSMC]

This conversion here is not replacing my original PC contained files this is just for a local copy on the go. So while your at dinner waiting on food, have the kids in the back of the car for a road trip, waiting in the ER for 2 hours while your bleeding out.

You can use the TP to watch some of your favorite clips or have something to entertain the kids.

Having the local copy means no dependance on internet connection, and having it properly encoded for the TP means more battery life as no wifi is used nor is the cpu/gpu working hard to decode it, also with only 16/32GB of space having the file size reduced is possibly one of the greatest benefits in that of itself.

Plus for any want to be video creators its nice to learn a few tricks and tips I share in the video that can be applied to other projects as well.

[oceangrace24]

The link isn't working, youtube is throwing an error. I was able to get to the video by removing the ?hd=1 and going to the standard definition video.

[stevhorn]

ViciousXUSMC

Thanks for the tutorial. It worked great. It is a little more time consuming than just watching with Kalemsoft, but the transcoded mp4s play much better in the native video player.

[ViciousXUSMC]

Originally Posted by oceangrace24

The link isn't working, youtube is throwing an error. I was able to get to the video by removing the ?hd=1 and going to the standard definition video.

Thanks I updated the link.

Originally Posted by stevhorn

ViciousXUSMC

Thanks for the tutorial. It worked great. It is a little more time consuming than just watching with Kalemsoft, but the transcoded mp4s play much better in the native video player.

Yeah, like given as an example in the tutorial even if my file could play I would rather have a sub 1GB file compared to the original 7GB file and they are going to look the same on the device if not the transcoded version may look better simply because its being done with top end tools and not having to be done on the fly.

This will save your device some battery power and give you more playback options.

Kalem is not free, I prefer to seek out my free options first.

Of those I would tell you if you prefer to use a new player for media instead of transocoding check out touchplayer it has probably about the same compatability as kalem but is 100% free.

It even works w/ subtitles witch I heard kalem does not.

[eblade]

The streamer that I'm working on will use TouchPlayer if it's present, otherwise it falls back to a Flash player . . so that's kinda neat.