Zaurus Multimedia

Despite not being made as a Multimedia-machine in the first place, the Zaurus can do pretty well as an Audio/Video player. The CPU, normaly clocked at 416MHz can be overclocked up to 624MHZ for playing Fullscreen-Video at 640×480 or down to 143MHz for longer batterylife when playing music. Someone made a test playing mp3's with the CPU clocked down to 143MHz and the display off and the Zaurus played MP3's for 24h!. Thats longer than a lot of dedicated MP3-Players last…

For audio-playing I use Kino2. Because it uses mplayer it can play a huge list of different audio-codecs/formats, among them mp2/3, ogg, flac, wav, ac3… I have enabled CPU-Frequency scaling in the settings and set “When Playing audio” to “Power Saving (143/143/71MHz)” (see section Video for screenshots of the settings). It still plays MP3/OGG without skips and the battery lasts a lot longer this way.

After some experiments I got my Zaurus to play Videos at 640×480 with 21fps quiet nicely. So here is my current setup:

These are the settings for kino2 v0.4.3c from the cacko-feed. The installed mplayer is mplayer-bvdd-iwmmxt also from the cacko-feed (Please note that this settings and the mplayer version are only valid for C1000/C3x00 Zaurii). Here are some screenshots of the important settings (click the images for larger version):

Encoding the Video Now that we know how to setup kino2 lets see how to encode the Video and Audio. I use the great mencoder (encoder-program from mplayer). For all who prefer a GUI-Program there is avidemux2 (the settings should be easy to transfer, maybe I will provide a custom profile sometime).

mencoder -vf scale=640:480,expand=::::1,hqdn3d -ofps 21 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=460:max_bframes=2:gmc:trellis:cartoon:chroma_opt:vhq=4:chroma_me:hq_ac:keyframe_boost=20:kfthreshold=1:kfreduction=10:max_key_interval=220 -af resample=44100 [other options] [input-file] -o [output.avi]

and some explanation for the […] blocks at the end:

[other options] here you can set things like audio-language or subtitles (see man mplayer for more info)

[input-file] the input file, actually this can be any mrl supported by mplayer

[output.avi] the name of the encoded video, since it is an in avi-format the name should end in “.avi”

A note for Widescreen-content: If your movie is widescreen instead of 4:3 you have to change “scale=640:480” to “scale=640:360” (for 16:9, if your movie has some other weird aspect ratio you will have to calculate the values by yourself ^^)

And now enjoy your favorite movie on the Zaurus

I have uploaded an avidemux profile for avidemux 2.3.0. Get this file and extract zaurus.js to ~/.avidemux/custom/ . After that you can use it by loading the video into avidemux and clicking custom→zaurus.js which should load the settings. After that you can save the image and after the transcoding watch it on your Z with the settings as written above. NOTE: The current profile is for 4:3 content