Hi, I have been the proud owner of an F900Bt for a few days. I have overcome most problems with the help of this page (Thanks All!)

 

The answer I can't find is what the best resolution or rip settings to use for movies. I have a few hundred movies ripped at full resolution (around 720x480 depending on movie) stored on my MythTV server, and they play great on my iPod through Apple's TV out cable. But when I play them via the iPod on my F900bt, they are all "zoomed in" cutting off content all the way around. I used Handbrake's "universal" rip setting in .m4v format. The screen format is listed has a higher resolution so maybe it is a config problem in my unit?

 

What are people using for settings:

1) actual video file resolution

2) settings for stereo for widescreen, full, normal, etc

3) settings on ipod for widescreen, etc.

 

 

ps. Bonus question: What settings affect rear screen also?

I have found using nero recode and setting the bit density down to about 800 produces a fairly compact video that looks ok on the f90bt. I have used other converters and I have run into the problem of letterboxing when small resolutions are used. If you can find a 640x480 setting, with 16:9 format on 4.3 movies, they will usually fill the screen.

 

THe problem I have seen is that the f90bt is too slow to navigate a large collection of movie files. It is so slow I quit trying to create a pack of them but rather just put one or two on a media to play.

 

I think the future firmware might solve the speed issues.

After playing with various settings, I have a solution that works perfectly. My goal when starting this project was to:

1) RIP each DVD once and store it at the highest quality at a reasonable file size.

2) The file must play on all devices including my Linux MythTV server, my iPhone, my kids iPod 120, and my F900BT (front and rear screen)

3) At least 2 sound tracks must be available. 5.1 AC3 for the home theater, and stereo for other devices

4) Chapter breaks must be preserved, and all other crap (FBI warning, pre-views, etc) must be stripped off.

5) all black bars must be cropped off the file so they don't double up when the device adds them back

6) There must be no loss of visible content on any screen (no cropping).

 

In the end, I am ripping the movies using Handbrake 9.3, and DVD43 as the decoder. Both of these are freeware. I use the Universal Apple setting which gives me a h.264 file in M4V format (MP4 looses chapter breaks). I add the AC3 audio as a 2nd channel, and use 720x480 as the resolution. It comes out somewhat smaller than that depending on what was cropped off for the black bars. The file sizes are around 850mb per hour. Due to the full rez rip, they look fantastic on my High Def projector being driven with MythTV.

 

As for the F900BT, I set the ipod settings at WIDESCREEN = ON, and FIT TO SCREEN = OFF, which took care of most of my cropping problems when displayed on the F900BT.

 

On the F900BT, I set FIT TO SCREEN =FULL which displays the entire content of the movie on the front and rear screen, but might display black bars on top/bottom if it is a really wide screen movie. If you want to loose the bars, change the FIT TO SCREEN setting, and it will cut off the left and right edges of the content but be full screen top to bottom. That is a matter of preference I suppose. Since the iPod is doing the h.264 decoding, as well as the file management, I don't notice any slowdown on the 900bt.

 

So I now have about 80 movies ripped and love the results. I have a 3 year old who sits in her perch watching "Finding Nemo" via the ipod, via the 900bt, on the rear overhead screen. When the scary shark part comes on, I hit the NEXT button on my steering wheel control and it jumps to the next chapter.

 

The only part I have not figured out is how to play the AC3 DD audio channel in the car. My MythTV server recognizes is on audio track 2 and I get full 5.1 audio, but the 900bt only seems to use the 2 channels on audio track 1.

I just did some testing myself over lunch, and came up with some interesting stuff. All my tests were done with video on an SD card, NOT an iPod.

 

I had a bunch of files which were less than 640 Horizontal, and they all displayed at less than full-screen. Yuk. I tried encoding files at 640 H and 800 H, and they displayed, although the aspect ratios were messed up. A 4x3 aspect ratio video that was 640x480, stretched to fill the screen. This means the pixels aren't square, and are actually 1.33:1. (480 / 9 * 16 = 853, 853 / 640 = 1.33)

 

Since the screen is about 16x9 (800x480 is actually about 16x9., I took some widescreen videos and tried resizing and transcoding to H.264 using MPEG Streamclip (free, both Mac and Windows). My 16x9 videos looked about right -- at least close enough for my testing purposes.

 

I then took a 1280x544 Star Trek XI (w00t!) movie trailer off Apple's trailer site, which was actually a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Figuring that the pixels on-screen were not square, I did the following conversion:

 

First, I halved both H & V resolutions:

1280 x 544 -> 640 x 272

 

Then, I stretched the V resolution only.

272 * 1.33 = 360

 

My final video was 640 x 360. It looked smooshed on my 1:1 pixel Mac monitor, but when played back on the F700bt, it looked spot on!

 

So, if you've got a widescreen video, at least 16x9, or 1.78:1, reduce both dimensions by the same ratio so it ends up horizontally at 640, but then scale the vertical resolution by 1.33 -- as long as it stays less than 480, the AVIC's max vertical res!

 

 

Now, data rates. Yuk. I started off at about 2.5Mbps video + 192Kbps audio, and the video stuttered horribly. I took it down to 1.5Mbps, still bad. Down to 800Kbps, and it was better, but it didn't take long for the audio to get out of synch. Even at 512Kbps, things got out of synch.

 

Any idea how slow you've got to go to keep this stuff in synch? Even at 512Kbps, things are starting to look pretty ugly for such a large screen. I've got a bunch of DVDs that I ripped with with HandBrake, but I'm not going to bother converting them to put them on an SD card if the audio won't stay in synch.

 

 

Oh, and the F700bt/900/90 have no surround decoder built in, so the only thing they will ever be able to playback is 2 channel stereo. Sorry.