Stupid Video Software

I've used VirtualDub and a few others, they all stink. It is such a pain to get the results you want. I don't really want anything special, I want smooth video at 20fps with a picture that takes up the whole screen without black bars. I've seen that it's possible, but why does it have to be so tedious?

You'd think VirtualDub would have simplified this by now. Many movies have different aspect ratio's right? They're not all 16:9 or 4:3. You may want get rid of the black bars, or you may want to keep them. You may even just want to minimize the black bars so that that you keep most of the picture, but it's still tall enough to watch on a 2.4" screen. One thing I can't imagine anyone would want is a stretched picture! The software shouldn't allow you to stretch the picture, that's just retarded. Unfortunately, if you want to go from whatever format the movie is in to 320x240 (4:3), stretching is pretty much a default. You can fix it by cropping, but why should you have to? And it's not easy to crop and attain the correct aspect ratio unless you know what you're doing. Like I said, too tedious.

Here's an idea. You open a video conversion program. You select the video file you'd like to convert. Then you select your desired aspect ratio, say 4:3. Voila, a 4:3 box appears centered over your video. The 4:3 box is adjustable, you can make it bigger or smaller to take up however much of the picture you like, but it stays in a 4:3 ratio and centered. You adjust it how you like it and click "OK". Now a window pops up asking you which 4:3 resolution you'd like. You pick 320x240 and click "OK" once more. Now you click "CONVERT". Wow, that was so easy, so simple. Why the hell hasn't anyone created a program like that?!

I understand that VirtualDub and other programs are not meant only for the Meizu, but doesn't that sound like something everyone might want?

Just try encoding with MediaCoder (for me it's the best with all my video files). I made a setting for miniPlayer who works fine (i must say that all my video files length is lower than 1 hour !).

I didn't find anything particularly easy to do with that software either. It seems that it has no problem showing you what some settings are, but not so easy to figure out how to change them to what you want.

On another note. I was playing with VirtualDub some more. I've been trying to get a nice conversion of the 29th chapter of The Matrix. It seems to come out kind of choppy. I followed instructions several times in the forum, but no luck on smoothness, at least not by following the instructions. Also telling VirtualDub to go from 720x480 to 320x240 results in a stretched picture. If I crop the left and right I can take care of the stretching, but not the choppiness. If I crop the left, right, top and bottom it somehow becomes smoother BUT for some reason the picture looks really crappy, lots of horizontal lines during movement. It makes no sense to me. Will there ever be a decent piece of software available?

I would like to see if anyone can take the 29th chapter of The Matrix and convert it to 320x240 at 20fps with a decent picture and upload it. If it looks good I'd like to know EXACTLY how it was done. I've fiddled around for hours and hours with no acceptable results and it's getting really old!

If you don't have The Matrix, I'd like to see anything. I saw a forum where some guy had some really nice results with some video trailers and a music video he downloaded. They weren't converted from VOB but I'm not sure that would make a difference.

You had any more luck with your smoothness issue?

try BatMan. See screenshot and download the program here : BatMan - einfache Stapelverarbeitung für MEncoder

Avisynth can convert fps not just drop frames.