User Interface – it matters

How I came to use Super to encode video for my Sony Ericsson W810i and my experiences with it. Feel free to skip down to the Program section.

Background (ye olde blogge)

The Christmas period was very heavy going.

On the one hand, its great to catch up with friends and family who you haven’t seen in ages and properly switch off and have some pure relaxation time, on the other hand I’m lucky enough to have been invited to a party practically every night of the two weeks I took off. This was bad news for my bank account and also for my fitness/health. I reckon that it is entirely possible to develop a physical dependence/conditioning on alcohol in just two weeks…I literally noticed my body perking up after the first pint of the day towards the end of the second week. Quite worrying.

Back at the start of October I sprained my ankle at a sailing event. I was  paid crew for the week so I really had no choice but to finish out the last day of racing, and I have no doubt that jumping around on it did no good in terms of my recovery time. It was far and away the worst injury I’ve ever had  – the hospital was astonished that they couldn’t find evidence of a break when I got an x-ray afterwards and my physio said it was the worst sprain she’d ever seen.

So I’d been forcibly kept out of the gym for 10 weeks or so, and then the two weeks of partying put paid to it for a further couple of weeks.

I had a program to work on from my physio, part of which was 20 minutes on the bike. I’ve always found the bike to be incredibly boring, more so than the treadmill for some reason, and I’ve struggled to spend 5 minutes warming up on it, let alone the 20 recommended by my physio.

Yesterday however I was hit by the realisation that the bike is perfect for watching videos on. Over the holidays I’d been tinkering with encoding video for my Sony Ericsson W810i mobile phone. I found out the settings for doing it manually using something like FlaskMPEG (which I use to back up my DVDs) but I wanted to see if I could find a program which had the appropriate presets.

After trying a few, the only (free) one which I could find was Super (Magic Video Converter looks really nice and seems to do the job well but it has a small license fee). Super is Windows only, and both encodes and plays video and claims to support more video types/codecs than VLC.

The Program

Functionality

The Sony Ericsson w810i supports mpeg-4 encoded video, and aac audio. It does however seem to require the .3gp container. After a bit of Googling I found Super (the download link is at the bottom of the page, and I could only download at about 3 kb/sec).

Super is by eRightSoft, whose website looks like it was designed in the early 90s. Having to drill through pages repetitively to get to the product page I linked to previously doesn’t inspire confidence, and frankly I wouldn’t trust this crowd to walk my dog, but having blocked its internet access and tested it in a VM I felt safe enough to give the program a go, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Super has a predefined format for encoding for Sony Ericsson phones – it actually has a very extensive list of presets which I haven’t tested including settings for a range of devices such as the iPod/iPhone, Zune, Nintendo-DS and various different mobile phones. I selected the .3gp container and made sure that the mpeg-4 video codec and acc audio codec were selected, and set the Video scale to 176:144 which is the resolution of my w810i. The only other settings I changed were to set the bitrate at 160 kbps (any higher and I found that the video got a bit choppy when playing back on the phone) and I bumped up the audio to 48kpbs.

Because the w810i doesn’t let you search/rewind through video, I split my videos using VirtualDub (awesome program…make sure you select Video –> Direct Stream Copy when doing this or it’ll reprocess the video) into smaller sections (I split a 22 minute South Park episode into 4 pieces…maybe a bit ott) before running them through Super. Update: The phone is perfectly able to search/rewind when the video is viewed through the media player. If the video is opened from the file manager, then the search/rewind functionality isn’t available. I am occasionaly quite dense.

Super lets you batch encode files, which is great. On my machine (stock e8400) it took between 20-30 seconds for each section…so fast that I really wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Naturally if you go for higher bitrates its going to take longer.

All that remained was to drop the videos onto the phone’s memory card, and now I’ve got entertainment for my bike sessions!

The GUI

Lets just say…there’s room for improvement.

Functionally, in terms of selecting the various encoding options, its actually quite nicely laid out. All of those options are on the one screen, and they’re logically grouped. The progression from top to bottom and left to right makes sense, and there’s a very informative tooltip which pops up when you hover over each control. As a replacement for a Help file…its very good for someone who has done some encoding previously, but most beginners would have to go looking for further information.

Annoyances

To specify the Output Location of the encoded file – which is a fairly important part of the whole procedure – you have to right-click anywhere(!) on the program window and choose Output File Saving Management, or press Ctrl+T. Not exactly intuitive. Also, the default saving location is within the program’s folder in Program Files…not quite as bad as installing a program in Docs & Settings, but inconsistent and annoying. There should be a location dialog on the main screen.

In fact, any options beyond those on the main screen have to be accessed by right-clicking (anywhere in the window!). There is no Program Menu at the top of the window. As an alternative paradigm to the Program Menu I can see what they were trying to do – it provides quick access to the program options, all in the one list – but it doesn’t work. Its too un-intuitive.

As a further (non-inhibiting) annoyance, the programmers don’t use the native Windows window controls. No, its not possible to maximise by double-clicking on the title bar…we’re stuck with the default window size.

Conclusion

Super is a very useful video encoder. I haven’t tested its playback functionality, but it encoded video for my Sony Ericsson w810i very well.

Its comprehensive selection of presets and easy tweaking of settings puts it ahead of pretty much all the other free video encoding software I tried (I must be one of the only people in the world who didn’t like Handbrake).

The GUI could use some work, particularly in its failure to conform to Windows conventions, and also with regard to the hiding away of the Output location, but I’ve seen worse and overall it does what I need comprehensively and quickly.