Project Elite v6.5 - Choppy Video Recording and Playback

The Problem

I got an OG Droid (Motorola Droid 1) and have been using it as music player / nerd toy until I activate it when my Verizon contract is up in a few months. At some point after flashing it with the Project Elite v6.5 rom, my video started recording choppy (choppily?). Hence, playing back choppy (due to recording state)...not horribly, but enough to degrade the viewing experience, certainly.

The Fix

A few forums I found said to 'clock cpu to 600MHz'...from what I can tell, they meant to change the following:

Settings > Elite Settings > Performance > CPU settings > Max CPU frequency -- change this to 600MHz

Using the default Kernel, I wasn't able to do this. I first had to modify the kernel by doing the following:

Settings > Elite Settings > Performance > Change Kernels -- from P.E LV 1.05ghz(default) to Elite Series v3 LV 900mhz

Once that is done, I had to restart. Once the kernel was updated, I had to go back and set the Max CPU frequency to 800MHz or 600MHz...either seemed to do the trick for me.

I also made sure I checked the box at the bottom of the 'CPU settings' screen...it seems to 'remember' the clock you set on restart. Which is important.

In Conclusion

This information was available in forums, but wasn't very specific..so I hope to save someone a little time by reading it here.

Extract Ogg (ogv) from Matroska (mkv)

The Story

I don't do much with video. I finally wrote a script which compresses all the files in a given folder using the handbrake cli...just for archiving my home videos that had been digitized; on import they were some slight compression avi. The cli lets me automate converting my videos to a patent free (afaik) format -- Ogg. I use both Theora and Vorbis in a Matroska container...I was going Ogg (Ogv) container, but handbrake didn't support that, and I hear Matroska is better...or far more capable. Even though Ogv would have been fine for my purposes. Oh well.

Anyway, I decide that I want to make a webpage on my development server (read: home computer) that allows my home videos to be seen by my family without the hassle of uploading them to youtube...and carefully optimizing them first or watchmaking Youtube butcher the already mediocre quality. I decided to embrace the future and use the upcoming html5's 'video' tag.

Ah, man...I JUST encoded/archived all my videos to Matroska...even though they were encoded with Theora/Vorbis, the Matroska container doesn't work. I need to extract (I don't want to transcode them and lose all that quality. are you kidding?) the streams from the Matroska format and put them in an Ogg (ogv) container...somehow. Can't be hard, right?

I tried loads of things. MKVToolnix, AVIMux GUI, VirtualDubMod...and I read loads of forums, mostly about people wanting to convert MKV (h.264) to AVI (xvid). I finally read something about ffmpeg...so I thought I could at least (since I encode to the original size AND to a half-size) transcode from the large .mkv to .ogv with that.

20 minutes into it, my Ogg (.ogv) files were looking horrible and coming out at half the size of the (same resolution) input, I did a few searches for optimal settings .ogv or something and came across a post that mentioned something I hadn't seen in the documentation (although I'd imagine it's there)...the ability to 'copy' the audio and video stream. Someone was just using ffmpeg to extract a 1 minute segment from a video file without re-encoding. That's what I want to do!!!

Long story short, this code did it for me:

The Code

ffmpeg -i mysourcevideo.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy myoutvideo.ogv

A straight 'Direct Stream Copy' (i used to use VirtualDub -- pardon me), essentially...with no loss in quality and a container change. Now I can make a quick script...I'm not sure if I'll do it for all my videos or just the half-sizes...as I don't really wanna stream the large ones, which I make available for download.

Be End.

Software

ffmpeg

Epilogue

Now I'm just wondering if Handbrake CLI has any advantage (for my use, anyway) over ffmpeg?