video playback on PPC

by **chadwolcott** on Tue Jan 06, 2004 7:37 pm

I have been toying with the idea of playing movie trailers on my ppc remote. Unfortunately I haven't been able to determine a way to launch the wmplayer on the ppc from the xlobby interface, is this possible and I'm missing something? This would be really cool if possible.

by **stevenhanna6** on Thu Jan 08, 2004 7:29 am

actual streamed video playback on the ppc :shock:

in my experience video play back over wifi is pretty choppy, maybe 802.11G could do it..not sure if the cpu or the bandwidth was the bottleneck.....even then I needed speacial software to stream/playback from a shared network drive. I assumed you wanted to stream the video file to the ppc....maybe you have had better luck then me....it is a cool idea though.

by **chadwolcott** on Thu Jan 08, 2004 1:59 pm

No luck as yet, I am still awaiting my CF WiFi card actually so I haven't even gotten too far looking into it yet. I have re-encoded a number of trailers to 240x128 in Divx format and placed them on my HTPC. It would be awesome if you could play them on the ppc or even in the xlobby window somehow, maybe have the stills section change to display it.

by **smurgle** on Thu Jan 08, 2004 7:20 pm

in my experience video play back over wifi is pretty choppy

Actually 802.11b is fine for PPC video playback. I'm not sure how you are encoding the video, maybe you are using a too-high bitrate or not scaling it to PPC size?

Anyways here is a good guide http://www.bigdsvideo.com

Also SnapStream streams video well to PPC with automatic re-encoding of content. If you have it you can look through the options to see how they set the parameters. They use divx4 by default.

by **chadwolcott** on Thu Jan 08, 2004 7:29 pm

the streaming isn't the problem per se, it's getting xlobby to actually do it that is. I am using Divx for the re-encode, I personally prefer xvid, but I haven't found a ppc xvid codec so I'm using divx instead. Incidentally, I worked up a view trailer button on my movieviewer that launches zoomplayer set to fill the "rectangle area" on the screen to play the trailer I have for the movie. Now if I can only find a way to pass the parameter to zp to load the trailer :oops: