Ac3 Playback With H.264 Video In Mkv Container


rmm2131

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Feb 4, 2008
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I have many of my movies encoded with High Profile x264 in MeGui at a maximum of 720x416 with a bitrate of up to 1500kbps with Cabac, B-frames, and 5 mixed ref frames enabled. I also have audio of either 448kbps AC3, or even higher DTS audio in these mkv files of mine. My question is does it seem likely the Pandora will be able to handle such monumental media playback?

I read in another post that the chip inside the Pandora will be able to handle H.264 and the device will use either VLC or mplayer to handle playback, both of which can play these video/audio files easily under a Windows environment, but this is a different machine and OS.

I know it's for gaming and i'll definitely be buying it anyways, but still it would be a wonderful bonus to watch a HQ H.264 video with AC3(or DTS) on the go when i'm not fighting Ganon or Death Adder. ;)
 
rmm21 said:
I know it's for gaming and i'll definitely be buying it anyways, but still it would be a wonderful bonus to watch a HQ H.264 video with AC3(or DTS) on the go when i'm not fighting Ganon or Death Adder. ;)
h.264 support is a good thing to have, but only to avoid having to transcode pre-existing h.264 encoded media. The h.264 codec gives very small, very HQ video, but at the cost of CPU horsepower. Decoding it is absolutely murder. The original xbox still chokes on it.

You will burn through batteries considerably faster watching h.264 than something easier to decode, like xvid (which just happens to be open source).
 
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I'm expecing h.264 etc. "compatibility" as opposed to "compliance" to avoid licensing issues, if they can get away with it. Or some similar verbal fudge to give us the ability to play the files without the need for them to pay ridiculous license fees to be able to *say* they can play them...
 
javaJake said:
This all brings up a good question: What utility (and with what options) should one use to re-encode into the best bang-for-byte format?
That's a trick question. There is no one perfect container/codec/bitrate combo. The ideal encode strategy depends on a lot. In no particular order, you need to consider the size and quality of your source, the size and quality you want to end up with, the capabilities of your playback device, the type of video you're encoding (film, TV, animated, etc), whether you need subtitles / multiple audio tracks, and whether you want to use commercial or free codecs and utilities.

Best to wait until there is an actual media player available for Pandora before trying to figure any of this out. That is going to be the real deciding factor. No point in saying "So-and-so is the ultimate codec" if so-and-so won't be supported by the player.
 
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