Pocket DVD Studio 4.0 Online Manual

Crop Mode:

To let widescreen movies better displayed on a Palm device, you can choose the following crop modes based on your personal preference.

Crop mode 1 Cut off the top black bar, use the bottom black bar for subtitle display. Cut off unimportant left, right wings.
Crop mode 2 (Recommended) Cut off top and botton black bars. (Please set subtitle to "None"). Cut off unimportant left, right wings.
Crop mode 3 Cut off unimportant left, right wings.
Crop mode 4 Cut off the top black bar, use the bottom black bar for subtitle display.
Crop mode 5 Cut off top and bottom black bar. (Please set subtitle to "None")
Crop mode 6 No cut off. (Default Mode)

Resolution:

You can choose a resolution from the list. Different devices have different screen resolutions. For example, Treo 600 has a 160x160 screen, so you need to choose one of the 160x... resolutions from the list. Most palm devices have 320x320 or 480x320 screen resolutions. You may choose any resolution that is smaller than the screen.

Crop mode 2:
464x272	320x176

Larger resolutions require more space in your memory card. For example, 416x240 (100kpixel) usually requires twice the space as 272x160 (44kpixel) requires under the same movie quality.

Resolution of 480x320 is not recommended to use, because the performance of MMPlayer degraded significantly when width>464. We recommend to use 464x272 instead. A 400MHz Palm device can play 700kbps video smoothly in that mode.

Aspect Ratio:

For widescreen(16:9) movies, you can stretch the video up to 4:3 in order to remove black spaces shown on top and buttom of the screen. It's a personal preference on how much you want to stretch. Stretching too much will cause people looks tall and thin on the screen. This setting can be used together with the cropping options.

Movie Quality & Size

To reduce the output size, you can either choose a lower movie quaility or a smaller resolution. Movie quality only degrade when there is fast motion. For cartoon movies or movies without many scenes of violence, a lower movie quality still provides very good quality.

Video Frame Rate:

Known as Frame Per Second (FPS) refers to the number of pictures displayed in 1 second in order to form continuous motions. The default frame rate is 15 fps. You may choose higher fps and increase the output size to get more continous motions.

*IMPORTANT* : If your palm device is not powerful enough to handle 20fps or 24fps video in high bitrate, it will actually drop frames and cause video to shutter.

The maximum fps for NTSC films is 24fps. Countries using NTSC standard include: USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, ...

The maximum fps for PALfilms is 25fps. Countries using NTSC standard include most European countries, Australia, China, Israel, ...

2-pass encoding

This setting allows the recorder to analyze the video stream (in the 1st pass) before recording. Based on the analysis data, the 2nd pass will generate video in better quality (especially in fast motion scenes). This is done by distributing more bits to the fast motion part (analyzed during the 1st pass) and giving less bits to the more static part.

The analysis pass is a little faster than the real recording pass. So the overall recording time of 2-pass recording is less than (single pass recording time * 2).

Brightness Level:

Increase the level to make video appear brighter on your Palm's screen. The default is level 0 (No brightness change from the original video).