Conversion for Insignia Pilot mobile players?

[jkoerner]

Hi

can anyone tell me if the DVD-to-Mobile or File-to-Mobile products can produce output playable on the Insignia Pilot players? (the player was sold by BestBuy, but it is a surprisingly great player even though not as well known as iPods and Zunes etc.)

Thanks
J.K.

[GregiBoy]

Can you give us the specs of the format it plays? I checked the Best Buy website and it only gives the audio specs.

Better still, if it has a sampel video file that plays on it, copy that to your hard disk and download MediaInfo and use it to determine the files specs.

I would suspect that Fab will do it but haven't heard of or seen a question seen a question on this device before.

[jkoerner]

Specs for Insignia Pilot formats

Can you give us the specs of the format it plays?

I would suspect that Fab will do it but haven't heard of or seen a question seen a question on this device before.

I will have to go look those up and get back to you. I know that it uses WMA or MPEG4 formats.

I had a heck of a time trying to get [reference deleted]product to create files for it. I finally succeeded in doing it, by trial and error, since [reference deleted] tech support was unable to help me.

I was hoping maybe DVDfab had an easier ready-made template for the conversions.

thanks
J.K.

[signals]

DVDFab comes with control files, called profiles, for many different devices along with a Generic set that can be configured to work with almost anything. Your experiences with other products may be of interest to some but are not relevant to the process of making DVDFab work better for you and violate the forum General Policies. You have made similar comparisons in at least one other thread as well. We have few rules here but expect those we have to be followed. If you have not read them, please do so. The General Policies can be found in any of the Software Support forums the Forum Rules in a forum of their own near the top of the index page. I have edited the offending references from your post to make it acceptable rather than delting it since you have an ongoing problem awaiting resolution. Get the video requirements from BestBuy, GregiBoy is an expert with the profiles and will make you one that will work. I consider this a poor use of my time, so think of this as a friendly reminder to a new member.

[Keledole]

Hi. Just sqw your post. My kids have the Insignia NS-8V24 Pilot player and use DVDFAB to convert our videos. I will tell you what works for me.

Using DVD to Mobile use the generic.avi.xvid.mp3 profile

Encoding Method - Fast encoding (1-pass)

Fixed Bitrate - 512 kbps (mandatory)

Split - No split

Framerate - (Leave alone)

Audio bitrate - 128 kbps

Channel - stereo

Volume - 150% ( your preference. I found 100% too low)

Subpicture - No subpicture ( If you don't want subtitles then I recommend that you use this setting. I have inadvertently encoded them in the past)

Now here is the really important part. Frame resolution MUST be 320x240! Nothing else works. If your source is in 4:3 then it is easy to just click on the radio button in the list of available resolutions.

If it is in a widescreen format then I click on "Advanced Resolution Settings">"Crop settings" which will bring you to the crop settings window. Click the "Customized" button and adjust the left and right borders numbers by trial and error until you get a 320x240 option to choose. At first it is a pain but it becomes easier the more you do it. If you get close but can't get it then move the top or bottom setting 1 setting and that usually allows you to get the perfect 320x240 you need.

This method of cropping to 320x240 makes the player use the entire screen instead of the black bars at the top and bottom. The screen is small enough as it is and besides that as I said before, anything other than 320x240 will not work.

If you want the full widescreen video then you will have to run dvdfab at any resolution and then run it thru another media conversion program to convert it to 320x240 as a whole (black bars and all). My player came with a free media converter defeatured to convert any compatable video format to the specs required for the pilot. Personally I crop the video with DVDFAB and fill the screen.

I have these settings set as my generic.default by clicking on the "set as default" button in the upper right. It makes it ready to go less the cropping for the Pilot.

Another thing, when I move the file to the player by dragging and dropping you may get a popup message that "some aspect of the file are outside the limits of the player. Do you want to continue?" (or something like that) just put it in the player anyway and try it. It usually works just fine. I suspect that a cropped video while saying 320x240 may be slightly off to cause the popup but almost always works.

I'm sure that this is not the only way to acomplish your goal but it works for me. Goodluck and let us know how it works.

[GregiBoy]

Thank you Kel for sharing your working solution....

That is what a forum is all about, not just asking questions.

G...

[jkoerner]

Thanks, Keledole

Hi. Just sqw your post. My kids have the Insignia NS-8V24 Pilot player and use DVDFAB to convert our videos. I will tell you what works for me. ....

Thank you VERY much for you extremely helpful reply!

I will give your method a try.

J.K.

[jkoerner]

Pilot Insignia output tests and concerns

Hi. Just sqw your post. My kids have the Insignia NS-8V24 Pilot player and use DVDFAB to convert our videos. I will tell you what works for me.

Okay, I have tried the settings you suggested (only with one 4:3 movie, and only with DVD-to-Mobile -- I did it twice, once using the original movie disc as the source, a second time using DVD-9 video files outputted by HDDecrypter as the source), and they seem to work so far. So thanks again for your help with this! - I am sure it would have taken me a lot of time and aggravation to find the settings which work by myself.

(I have not yet experimented with File-to-Mobile, using other types of video files as source).

However, I still have a couple of concerns with the DVD-to-Mobile program:

1. Widescreen vs FullScreen movies: As you described, it is much more difficult to use this program with widescreen movie sources. Because it is difficult to get it set to an exact 320x240 output resolution. I find the prospect of hassling with that every single time I convert a widescreen movie unnappealing. There should be a way to make that setting apply automatically with every conversion involving a widescreen source.

2. Deinterlace: You did not mention this setting in your description. There is a checkbox for "deinterlacing" in the conversions settings page. It is unchecked by default. I am not yet sure about the effects of having that box checked or unchecked.

3. Settings (both those on the first screen where you select the source input, and those on the second screen - the "Conversions Settings" screen), must be done repeatedly -- once for EACH OF THE TITLES being converted. So if you are converting some of the "Extras" on the original DVD disc, such as filmmaker documentaries, etc., then all the settings need to be set up for each of these documentaries separately, again and again, multiple times.

4. Subtitles: The settings provided for dealing with subtitles are pretty clunky. First, on the first screen where you specify the source folder, there is a window called "subpictures" [why do they call these "subpictures" instead of subtitles????] that lists the subtitle languages available, each with a checkbox. So you have to set this -- once for EACH TITLE that you are converting. Example: in the DVD movie disk I tested with, there were ten separate Titles -- those included the main movie, various "Extras" (documentaries, extra cuts, previews, etc.). So you would have to set up the subtitle language checkboxes ten separate times.

Underneath that window is a separate checkbox for "Display only forced subtitles". I looked at the documentation for this, but it is still not clear to me exactly what this thing does or doesn't do.

Also -- if you select more than one language in the checkboxes above, say English and French, then the checkbox for "Display only forced subtitles" gets grayed out so you cannot choose it.

Complicating the subtitle situation even further, when you go to the conversions settings screen, there is a drop-down box for "Subpictures".
that dropdown gives the user two choices -- either "Display the "subpictures" in the video", or "Extract the "subpictures" to IDX/SUB files".

Apparently, if you select the former, then the subtitles will be displayed for every chapter/Title, whether you want them or not, with no way to turn them off in the media player. If you select the latter, then it will not be possible to display ANY subtitles, because the media player (Insignia Pilot) does not have any way of controlling subtitles display when they're contained in a seperate .sub file. I don't know about other portable media players. There needs to be some way to produce output files that enable the user to select whether or not to display subtitles, and WHICH language, when viewing the movie on the portable media player.

In summary, DVD-to-Mobile does not seem to have any good way of dealing with subtitles that makes it user friendly to the user at the time of viewing the converted movie on a portable media player.

5. Saving settings configurations: After setting things the way you want in the Conversions Setting screen, you can then hit the Set as Default button, and these settings then will become the defaults and will appear the next time you use the program. However, this is a problem if you do this when you have set things up for a Fullscreen DVD movie, then the next time you want to convert a widescreen DVD movie.

There is supposedly a "Beta" profile editor somewhere on the website (but it has been in Beta for over a year, so it does not appear that there is any intent by the company to finalize this utility). This profile editor could possibly be used to create separate profiles for not only different portable media devices, but also for different sorts of source input files, such as fullscreen vs widescreen.

However, there is NOTHING in the profile editor about subtitles at all. So it is not clear how those profiles would work out vis a vis subtitles.

Have you got any solutions to any of these concerns?

thanks
J.K.

[jkoerner]

One other concern with the DVD-to-Mobile software:

It appears to only be able to output a movie as a single large .AVI file (as opposed to multiple chapter files). This is not a show stopper, but having the output in chapters does add convenience to finding a location in the movie when using a portable player. Since there is apparently no way to include the "Scene Selection" menu from the original movie disc into the converted output files.

Is there an alternative that I'm not aware of for making multiple output files, or some other means of navigation when playing on the portable player?

J.K.

[GregiBoy]

One other concern with the DVD-to-Mobile software:

It appears to only be able to output a movie as a single large .AVI file (as opposed to multiple chapter files). This is not a show stopper, but having the output in chapters does add convenience to finding a location in the movie when using a portable player. Since there is apparently no way to include the "Scene Selection" menu from the original movie disc into the converted output files.

Is there an alternative that I'm not aware of for making multiple output files, or some other means of navigation when playing on the portable player?

J.K.

Yes, split by chapter... Open the queue and then go to conversion settings.

Most of the other points that you outlined above can be addressed by modifying your profiles and having two profiles, one for 4:3 and one for widescreen.

As most users still prefer to modify the XML profile files with either notepad or wordpad, I can't see the profile editor progressing much further.

Profile parameters are outlined in an XML document in the Program Files\DVDFab 6\Profiles\Read Me subdirectory.

[jkoerner]

Yes, split by chapter... Open the queue and then go to conversion settings.

Thanks - , I just flat failed to see that one, because I was following Keledole's instructions on setup for the Insignia Pilot, in which he specified. "No Split."

Profile parameters are outlined in an XML document in the Program Files\DVDFab 6\Profiles\Read Me subdirectory.

Well, I looked at this, but I cannot see anything in there about how to setup for subtitles. How do you setup for those in a profile?

And so far, I cannot see how to set to automatically get a 320x240 resolution on 16:9 sources.

thanks
J.K.

[GregiBoy]

In the profile, edit the size list parameter like this size list="320x240".

In Fab's settings, set crop off and always select the resolution "supported by device."

On the subtitles, in Fab's settings, you can preselect a language but you are always going to have to choose burning the subs in or outputting to a separate file.