Smartmovie vs Nokia Video Manager

Introduction
One of the main video players and encoders in the Symbian world is Lonely Cat Games’ (LCG) SmartMovie (SM). SM has been around for a good few years, supporting all Symbian OS mobile phones. The latest version (3.40) is reviewed here, released March 2007.

According to the LCG web site, the features of SmartMovie are:

Standard AVI format, allowing you to preview converted files on your PC.

Portrait or landscape mode player, utilizing full screen size of the device.

Video rescaling to utilize full-screen area.

Split video files into multiple segments with the PC encoder so that they fit in phone storage space or memory card or cut end credits on a film to save valuable space.

Support for subtitles (sub, srt and txt formats).

PC converter – allows you to preview videos and measure the effect on quality when altering certain variables.

Support for DirectShow codecs.

Fast conversion; encoding is 5 times faster than realtime, meaning an entire movie may be converted in just a few minutes.

Bicubic rescaling to resize video to a lower resolution in high quality.

Manipulation of video and audio codec properties to suit user requirements – there are many presets as well as being able to manipulate properties manually.

Enhanced video player allowing - brightness, contrast, saturation, play mode, language, volume, and more.

Encoder Interface

SM’s interface is relatively straight-forward. Though I have seen far cleaner, more organized and intuitive GUIs, SM gets the job done. Buttons in the top section of the interface allow you to add and remove files which can also be done using the file menu, files added appearing in the white box. SM supports batch converting, which is useful if you are away from your computer or leave it running overnight. The “Add files” button needs to be used to do this as any other option will overwrite all files currently in the box. You can also click and drag or use shift+click/ctrl+click.

The next small section is for subtitles, SM supporting sub, srt and txt formats. This is very useful for anime collections and foreign films. Subtitles are clear and legible on the N95 as expected – they worked fine years back on my 7610.

The next area down on the interface is dedicated to “clip info”. Here SM displays the length of the video, its size, audio content (stereo or mono), resolution, video framerate and audio sampling rate.

The middle of the interface is the preview area, enabling you to see what your video will look like on the phone’s screen. There are basic controls such as play and stop and a “step” feature which allows you to advance frame by frame. You can also hold this button and press enter to play the video, releasing the enter key to stop the video quickly – the intention of this I assume is to check key areas of a video for detail or to accurately split a file in the desired place in conjunction with the “Segment” buttons.

Crop mode allows you to cut the edges of the video so the actual picture takes up more of the phone screen since its format is 4:3 and most content is now 16:9. This can also be used to remove any logos at the edge of the video. “Full” cropping cannot be recommended as it means you lose a lot of the picture, though this may be acceptable on some footage since content creators do not typically put important details at the extreme edge. Medium is a fair compromise and my preferred choice. Black bars at the top and bottom of footage actually take up valuable bits when encoding so it is worth cropping them so that the full bitrate is used on the actual video footage. It is also worth mentioning that the preview window can be misleading as it shows how the file will appear on the phone. If a file does not have any black bars or borders to start with, SM will not add any.

The bottom third of the interface is dedicated to the encoding functionality, with separate sections for video and audio settings. This is more my area of interest and expertise, though I shall endeavor to be brief and be as non-technical as possible. This area will be discussed more thoroughly later on.


Player Interface
The phone player is quite intuitive and the layout is much better than the encoder interface. There are seven items on the main menu, five of which are pretty self explanatory and do not really merit further discussion. The two main areas are the file browser (“Browse Files”) and the “Options” menu.

The file browser displays all compatible videos as of the last time the player was used. You need to hit the left selection key in the file browser to “rescan” the file system and display newly added files. You can also change the order of files on the menu and delete files.

The options menu allows you to tweak several aspects of both the player and the video. There are several options such as how the time is displayed (it can also be turned off), play mode, language (supports 25), text coding and display mode. Video-wise, you can change the brightness, saturation, contrast and also the audio pre-roll time if video is out of synch.

SM Player also resumes the video you were playing when you closed the application. This can crash the player, however, and can also surprise you if you had the volume loud. This can be turned off on the options menu, which results in less crashing. You can get straight back to where you were in a video with the seek bar anyway.

The player is pretty robust and handles video and audio well (if created within the confines of the encoder's maximum settings). Playback of material at higher quality settings than SM’s presets can create jerky motion, yet there is still some room for improvement when using SM’s top settings. I am confident the N95 could cope with higher bitrates. Switching the phone to landscape mode crashes or freezes the application, so be warned - portrait or landscape mode can be set on the SM options menu anyway so there is no need to use the slider.

Video Settings
Using the default “XviD encoder”, you can simply select a bitrate from the drop down menu. Available bitrates range from 32kbps to 1024kbps, going up in 8kbps, 16kbps and 32kbps increments. I wouldn’t recommend anything below 384kbps though this can depend on the quality, framerate and content of the source. SM’s interface has a “Reduce framerate” checkbox which means that it only uses every other frame, essentially halving the output file size. This can work well on some videos but is not recommended for videos with lots of fast action or a low framerate already as it will produce jerky playback. This would also depend on the purpose or audience of the video. If it was a video podcast, chances are the audio is essentially the most important part – say it was a video review of a smartphone, for example. Though video would need to be above a certain acceptable level of quality for viewers to see the item, poor audio quality would hurt it more as the presenter’s voice would be the most important aspect. However, space may be at a premium, in which case there may need to be a compromise between audio, video and framerate.

The player on the phone rescales video to fit the screen, so another way to reduce file size could be to reduce the resolution – for this to work well, the original video would need to be good quality.

Using the default XviD encoder, you see an estimate of the output size. Bitrate calculators are freely available online for other codecs. An XviD MPEG-4 codec with 2-pass encoding would take longer to encode but the quality would be much better. To use other MPEG-4 based codecs, these would need to be installed on your system and could then be selectable from the “Configure” option.

Audio Settings
Audio settings are very straightforward and I daresay most people have encoded some audio or ripped tracks from a CD to mp3 or AAC.

SM uses the Lame mp3 codec, supporting six different sampling rates from 8 KHz to 44.1 KHz and bitrates ranging from 8kbps(!) to 128kbps. You can “Force mono” to make the source only one channel for older Symbian OS mobiles but is not necessary now that most mobiles are able to playback stereo sound through headphones or speakers on the handset. SM also has a volume boost feature to increase the overall level of sound on a video if it is low. This can be previewed on the SM interface to ensure there is minimal or no clipping.

Finally, below the conversion area is the “Convert” button and a “Files” button which takes you to the directory where the files are saved (this can be set under the preferences option on the toolbar – all other options on the toolbar are duplicates of what is displayed on the rest of the interface below).

Testing
To test the encoder quality and, in turn, the player ability, I encoded the Spiderman 3 trailer. This was chosen as it would test the encoder and player ability due to it having fast cuts, lots of motion and skin tones to see how well it copes with large blocks of colour with graduation and detail.

Three different video bitrate settings were used, although audio bitrate has been kept the same as, on such a small clip, it makes negligible difference to the file size and there was not a lot of difference noticed in initial testing. For a feature film, however, it may be worth investigating lower settings if space is of a premium. That said, as aforementioned, there are several free bitrate calculators out there which cover all of these settings so you can find out what the file size will be before you encode.