[MPlayer-DOCS] Re: Draft: iPod encoding guide

[Guillaume POIRIER]

Hi,

On 1/17/07, Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim at gmail.com> wrote:

[..]

> I'm happy to document some or all of this (there doesn't appear to be
> a good summary of it anywhere, except perhaps this message itself when
> it hits the web archives), or I'm happy to leave the documentation
> as-is and say that it is focused on creating small videos optimized
> for viewing-on-iPod (as opposed to larger videos optimized for
> viewing-on-TV-through-iPod-dock-connector).

IMHO, it's ok give a brief overview of what's the deal with 640x480
videos on iPod, and to put a link to this discution in the docs.
You could write smth along the lines of:
All 5G+ iPod support 640x480 at 1.5MB/s videos too, with the same
subset of H.264 features as 320x240 videos, except for [place here a
brief talk about the special "secret" UUID in a specific atom, show
that support for them is currently very hackish]

This guide will mainly focus on creating 320x240 videos, but most
steps are equivalent for higher resultion videos (up to 640x480).


The reason I'm reluctant to document smth that requires hacks is that
I don't like the idea of "setting in stone" directions that are very
clumsy when, possibly, the day after I commit the doc patch, either
3rd party tools begin to support setting iPod UUIDs, or iTunes 8 ships
and stops checking for that stupid UUID.

I hope you see what I mean...

[..]

> I've lost track of the x264 refactoring you've done in the past week,
> but I think a mention of H.264 profiles would be worthwhile.  Or just
> a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles

You can have an overview here:
http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/DOCS/xml/en/encoding-guide.xml?view=log

Basicly:
Fixed some encoding option names (you were using the old ones)
(doesn't affect you, but please check that the options you're
suggesting in your patch are the new option names)
Fixed a typo in lavc section (doesn't affect you at all)
update x264's subq otion description (doesn't affect you)
update and factorize information about x264's multi-threading mode
(this affects you. You can link to the paragraph that discusses x264's
multi-threaded mode by using
linkend="menc-feat-x264-encoding-options-speedvquality-threads">
You can see the changes here (note that I already updated QT's encoding guide):
http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/DOCS/xml/en/encoding-guide.xml?r1=21931&r2=21932

Other changes are just typo/wording/style fixes, that do not really
affect you either.

Guillaume