What should the optimal video settings be when loading videos onto the Motorola XOOM?

If you have some wedding DVDs or other personal video to which you own the copyright, you can use the following guidelines for encoding it in a manner that allows it to playback optimally on your device.

Click here for a list of compatible video formats.

Click here to follow our Motorola forum discussion regarding video conversion.

If you stick with H.264 Baseline Profile, you can achieve up to 1920x1080p at 30 fps at 20Mbps.

Baseline Profile means:
- No CABAC entropy coding.
- No B frames
- No 8x8 transforms (DCT)
- No Weighted Prediction

For 1280x720p at 30 fps, you can go up to 20Mbps and Motorola XOOM Family Editionshould still be able to handle it. More Realistically, depending on the content, you can get away with 4Mbps and up with varying degrees of quality. If you are tight on space, use 4Mbps. If you want something to look good you can use 10/12 Mbps. At some point though the higher the bitrate will only translate to decreasing amounts of quality improvement. In other words, 20Mbps will probably look as good as 15Mbps, but will just use up more space.  Ultimately, there is really no one size fits all solution and it may take a little experimentation to find the settings that work best for the content you wish to view.

Additionally your device does not have a limitation on certain types of B frames (Main profile tool). So you can add in B frames and not affect performance that much. If you are using a encoding tool that uses B frames, such as QuickTime Pro, you should be able to achieve main profile encoding.

If you are using a lower resolution that 720p (such as 720x480 resolution size) in order to encode longer length video , you can get away with using more tools (High and Main profile tools). However, encoding become more complex and may require more experimentation to achieve acceptable results.

In general, if you are concern about performance, use baseline tools and possibly b-frames (with no weighted prediction). This will give you the best performance.

Also as side note, if you are upscaling from a DVD to 720p try to use the best upscaling algorithm provided and don't expect to get true 720p quality from upscaled DVD.