Videos From DVD: What's Best?

[Stargater]

I've got a Samsung Galaxy 5 Player. I was excited about getting it as it had 5-inch screen and I expected it to play videos pretty well. And when I saw the prepackaged video included with the device, I was stoked.

But then it came time to transfer my videos to the Galaxy. It asked me if I wanted it to convert the videos (recommended), so I said sure and hit the button. It spent some eight hours to do it, but they eventually made it to my MicroSD card. But when I played several of the movies, I found that they were badly compressed and had compression artifacts everywhere. So I formatted the card and tried again. This time I said "NO" to the conversion question and the videos copied quickly and easily to the memory card.

This time the videos were much better, but there were still video artifacts -- artifacts that were not there when played on Windows Media Player on my computer.

So my question is this: What's going on?? How does one process videos so they come out crystal clear and sparkling? The format I'd used was WMV, and the videos were great on my home computer screen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh, and when I connect my Galaxy via my USB connection, my computer doesn't always recognize the device. I thought this was a problem that was solved long ago on mp3 players. Many times I have to turn off the device, then turn it back on. Still, it's a hassle.

Anyone else having these issues?

Thanks!

 

[Demache]

If you can, use a higher bitrate. It should hopefully reduce the compression artifacts, at the expense of a larger file size. Or maybe try MP4.

Also, this is just a theory, it may not be showing up on your computer, because the screen on your computer isn't good enough to show them. It sounds weird, but if you have a normal TFT LCD screen, its probably hiding some of the more subtle compression artifacts that you can see plain as day on your phone. Either that or WMP has a mechanism to hiding the compression artifacts.

Either way, I've always found converting movies well to a portable device as being an art. Its like a skill that you have to spend hours (literally) finding the optimal settings for your device. I can't tell you how many times I've had to redo conversions because they came out subpar or stuttered the file size was ridiculous (2+ GB for sub-standard definition!)