Thoughts on a Toodles TE Kitty

Long story short: to have the best PS3 stick available, you'll need to get a Mad Catz TE FightStick for the Xbox 360 first.

http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/comment/10137013/#Comment_10137013

http://godlikecontrols.com/

Mysteries of the MP4 solved

Let's start with what we already know:


XviD4PSP 5.xx is the best encoder for everything. I only really use two formats:

• MP4 PS3 or XBOX360
• MP4 PSP AVC

Go to settings and disable auto volume, auto crop, and analyse interlace. Check the global settings and change the temp folder to the same drive you're encoding your video so you're not waking up any sleeping drives when batch encoding.

For most videos (basically any non-PSP video), I like to stick with:

• AVC profile: High
• AVC level: 4.1

I've already written about specific file sizes here, but now that I'm capturing and encoding every episode of Good Eats again at a mere 233 MB, let me just state unequivocally that 3-Pass encoding (versus 2-pass) does make a difference! In fact, the lower the file size and bit rate, the more it matters! I realized that a bit late (already halfway through all the episodes), but what're ya gonna do.



To add chapters to a video, take your newly encoded video and load it into YAMB 1.6 (you probably need to locate MP4Box under Options too). Load a text file that looks like this:

CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=1
CHAPTER02=00:03:16.363
CHAPTER02NAME=2
CHAPTER03=00:07:12.282
CHAPTER03NAME=3
CHAPTER04=00:10:27.010
CHAPTER04NAME=4

You could do this in YAMB 2.1 as well but there's no convenient "clear" button when you're adding chapters to multiple videos, though in the future I might cook up an AutoHotkey script to clear it instantly myself.



To encode the best quality videos for PSP, which is to use XviD4PSP's "MP4 PSP AVC" format at 720x480, follow these settings:

• under video encoding
• Encoding mode: 2-Pass Bitrate
• Bitrate: (kbps) 2000
• AVC profile: Auto (main)
• AVC level: 3.0
• under video > Resolution/Aspect
• Output Resolution: 720x480
• Resize filter: Lanczos4Resize

Then load that newly encoded video in YAMB 2.1 (Warning about uninstalling the 2.1 beta here). Highlight the AVC, go to Properties, then Pixels Aspect Ratio and choose. Without this step, the 720x480 video will not quite be 4:3 or 16:9, and you'll have to stretch within the PSP itself. 

That last one took me about a decade to figure out! I knew Media Go converted videos and kept the original aspect ratio at 720x480, but that program wasn't any good compared to XviD4PSP. With my PhotoFast adapter coming sometime in the future, I'll likely have enough room for every PSP game I've ever bought, all my music, and every Simpsons/Seinfeld/South Park episode!