P800 Screen Lock

One of the first things I needed to sort out on the P800 was a decent screen lock when in flip-removed mode. The default one is the bouncing Sony Ericsson logo which, being animated, isn't too battery-friendly. What's even worse is that when the screen is locked touching the screen will turn on the backlight. This means the light is likely to turn on when the phone is bouncing around in your pocket. A partial workaround is to use the virtual flip screen lock which does disable the touch screen, but I don't like the virtual flip and would never use it otherwise, so I don't see why I should use it just to lock the screen.

I set about looking for a replacement. My early searches resulted in an app called SClock. SClock will display a basic lock screen showing the date and time, and most importantly, it disables the touch-sensitive screen when locked. Problem solved! However as well as the lock screen looking distinctly amateur and generally unimpressive, there also seems to be a bug where the time digits do not appear the first time you activate the SClock lock. Nevertheless, I continued to use this for a few days, that is until I gave QuickContact a try! This is a replacement Contacts app which has an included Screen Lock module. This screen lock is just what I've been looking for! It shows the date and time, disables the touch screen, AND looks very slick! I've been using it exclusively for several days now and am very pleased with it.

Update (Jan 2005): getting a screen capture of the lock screen proved to be impossible, so here is a photograph instead:

Encoding for SmartMovie

Okay ... I've made some progress on SmartMovie. After spending hours reading every scrap of information I could find on the net, I've come up with a couple of processes for encoding SmartMovie files on OS X. There seems to be some sort of obscure bug in ffmpegX which means we have to demux and process our audio seperately before remuxing the final file.

Note: depending on the aspect ratio of your source movie, these are the resolutions you want to aim for when resizing (step 4 below)

4:3 -- 272x208
3:2 -- 320x208
1.66:1 -- 320x192
16:9 -- 320x176
1.85:1 -- 320x176
2.35:1 -- 320x128

METHOD 1
Pros: Works on a wide variety of formats
Cons: Needs QuickTime Pro, only works on movies you can open in QT Player

Required software:
DivX 5.1 Mac codec
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
QuickTime Pro

1. Open the movie in QuickTime Player.
2. In the Movie menu choose Get Movie Properties (cmd-J)
3. Select 'Video Track', select 'Size', click 'Adjust'
4. Drag the corner of the video until it is the correct size for your aspect ratio (see chart above), click 'Done'

Exporting video from QT Player
5. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'DivX AVI', click 'Options'
6. Uncheck 'Audio', set framerate to 12.5, click 'Settings'
7. Set 'Encoding bitrate' to 120kbps, click OK
8. Click 'OK'
9. Change the name in the 'Save As' box, click 'Save'

Exporting audio from QT Player
10. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'Sound to AIFF'
11. In iTunes, option-click the Advanced menu, choose 'Convert to mp3', choose your AIFF file. An mp3 version of your AIFF will appear in your iTunes library.
12. Drag the mp3 from your iTunes library onto your desktop, delete the mp3 from iTunes

Finishing up with ffmpegX
13. Drag the mp3 from your desktop onto the ffmpegX icon
14. In ffmpegX select the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
15. In the Audio tab enter an Audio bitrate of 32kbps, click Encode
16. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button, choose the AVI file you created in step 9
17. Click the second 'Browse' button, choose the mp3 from step 15
18. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
19. Click 'Mux as...'

METHOD 2
Pros: Does not require QuickTime Pro, can encode directly from a vob
Cons: Limited to mpeg 1 and mpeg2

Required software:
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
0sex (only if you wish to encode a movie from a vob file)

Doing everything with ffmpegX
1. In the Tools tab, click 'Browse', choose your mpeg or vob file, click 'Demux'
2. Drop the video file (the m1v or m2v created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Xvid' preset
3. In the Video tab, set bitrate to 120kbps, 12.5fps, screen size according to the aspect ratio of your source movie (see table above), click 'Encode'
4. Drop the audio file (created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
5. In the Audio tab, set bitrate to 32kbps, click 'Encode'
6. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button and choose the avi file created in step 3
7. In the Tools tab, clock the second 'Browse' button and choose the mp3 file created in step 5
8. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
9. Click 'Mux as...'

After both methods you should end up with a file named 'yourmoviename.muxed.avi'. This movie should play at full screen in SmartMovie.

Using the values I've given above you should get about 10mins of video per 9MB file size. The video shows some compression artifacts and the audio is slightly tinny, but both are acceptable. You can experiment with changing the video and audio bitrates to achieve whatever quality is suitable. For example for a music video you would probably want to increase the audio bitrate to at least 64kbps, while for high speed, wide angle footage (like sports) increasing the video bitrate will help.

A 21 minute episode of the Simpsons encoded with the above settings comes out to 18.1MB (12.1MB video, 4.8MB audio, plus overhead)

OS X URL Handlers security hole

This problem has cropped up in the last few days. There has been much discussion about it, including on Slashdot here and here. The general consensus seems to be that the best solution is to use Rubicode's DefaultApp as documented on Daring Fireball.

Full screen video on the P800

After a lot of time and effort, I've given up trying to figure out the VICS video format. It looks like the only way to encode it will be with the proprietary PC-only encoder. So after looking around a bit for an alternative player I've discovered an app called SmartMovie that can not only play full screen video, it does it with better (in my opinion) quality picture than VICS.

After some testing I've concluded that SmartMovie is pretty impressive - given a decent bitrate the full screen video is of eye-popping quality. The app is advertised as being an xvid player, but I have learnt that it can also play DivX 5.1 video.

As far as content generation goes, the software package includes an encoder for the PC platform. I've tried it out on a PC at work, and it works very well and is amazingly fast. Unfortunately there is no Mac equivalent so we'll have to work out a manual method of conversion, however I'm not too worried - xvid and divx encoding on the Mac is pretty good these days. I've had a few brief stabs at converting to a format SmartMovie accepts, but ran into a couple of bugs with ffmpegX. I'm confident I'll get it worked out soon though! Watch this space :-)

Movable Type, here I come

Well, I've taken the plunge and installed Movable Type onto my PowerBook. It's a very popular web log package which also happens to be free if you install it yourself (which probably accounts for its popularity). Since I know nothing about MySQL, I did some googling and found a very useful installation tutorial which led me through most of the process. Everything looks pretty good so far, although I still need to customize the look of the new pages.

P800 - second opinions

I've now been playing with the P800 for a few days, and have discovered some other things about the phone, both good and bad.

On the positive side of things:

Mobipocket Reader is a fantastic application for reading ebooks.

VICS Video Player is a promising-looking program, although it's still in beta. This program apparently can play video at full-screen resolution at 25fps! It seems to occasionally crash (although it may just be that I am low on memory) but when it works is a real eye-opener. The one drawback is a proprietary video format which you can't encode on a Mac.

On the negative side of things:

I've discovered what seems to be a major (from the point of view of an OS X user) problem in the last few days. It appears that if you don't have some way of sending an email from your phone (such as GPRS), there is no way of transferring a file from the phone to a Mac. From my readings it appears that the most common way to do this is to browse the phone (from a PC) via the SyncStation and just copy the desired file off the phone. As noted earlier this doesn't work on a Mac. But when I try and send a file via bluetooth from the phone (which should work!) I almost always get an error - actually, I've only succeeded once!

Cool phone, pity about the Mac support

Over the weekend I bought a three-month-old Sony Ericsson P800 mobile phone on eBay UK and it just arrived today! These phones can be had for a bargain right now, due to the recent introduction of this phone's successor, the P900.

The phone is, on the surface, awesome. It has a large 320x240 screen (Edit: it is actually a 320x208 screen) and, unlike most PDA phones, is shaped pretty much like an ordinary mobile phone. The screen is touch-sensitive screen with handwriting recognition (there is a stylus embedded in the side of the phone) and the Symbian OS it uses has a decent selection of third-party software. The major drawbacks are a proprietary memory card (Sony Memory Stick Duo - which is limited to 128MB at the moment) and the lack of Nokia's T9 predictive text input system.

However there is another major drawback to this phone - lack of OS X support! Firstly the included USB SyncStation stupidly does not work with OS X. You'd think you could just plug it in and browse the contents of the phone (as you can with other USB storage devices such as an Archos). Secondly the compatibility (via bluetooth) with iSync is atrocious. It is possible to sync the phone with OS X's Address Book and iCal, but only barely. To reliably sync even once you have to follow the steps in this Apple KnowledgeBase article - including a restart of your Mac system! After the one successful sync you will be unable to sync until you again go through the whole rigamarole.

I will keep on experimenting with the phone and report back here - I've added a P800 category to keep track of my exploring.