HandBrake

I've been pushing my Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet to see what it can take with encoded video/audio. This is the tablet that claims to have Dolby Atmos decoding abilities, so I've also had an eye toward testing that too. The following is what I've found to be good settings. If someone has any ideas on the video player situation I describe below, whacking Dolby audio, I'd appreciate any suggestions.

- Both the 7" (2015) and my current HD 8 can handle h.265 compression at a hardware level, so that's a good codec to use.

- The HD8 can take the AC-3 audio codec. So, AC3 passthru on DVD's that have it sounds great.

- The HD8 cannot decode DTS natively with the supplied media players.

- Here is the Dolby testing. The stock "Prime Pictures" app is what is used to play videos by default. That appears to convert surround sound to some kind of a sound field for headphones and even the built-in speakers if you hold it just right. Its not just virtualized, because stereo encoded video sounds just like that, stereo. It sounds really nice.
The issue is, every other video player I've tried, including MX Player, VLC, Kodi, and SPMC all squash the AC3 or AAC surround sound and give simple stereo output. I suspect that you have to use the Dolby API's to get the simulated surround, and since these apps were designed for the generic Android market, they don't use those APIs.

- I've found that you can get surround from AAC encoded content when I've set the Mixdown to 5.1. I haven't tried a mixdown on 5.1 content to some of the lesser Dolby levels, such as Dolby Pro-Logic, and Dolby Surround. I may update this post if I decided to try that.

Hi. I got my HD 8 tablet last year and I am just now finding this application to convert MKV to MP4 so they will play on my tablet using VLC. Extracting a 1 1/2 hour blu-ray movie to MKV creates a huge file, around 15 gig! So I am hoping to convert that to MP4 so it is substantially smaller. It sounds like you are way more knowledgeable than me on using handbrake so I am hoping you can recommend using a preset under devices that will do this?

This is a pretty old post, so I didn't notice it had been resurrected. I use a custom preset, but, you could start with the Android Tablet 720p preset. Problem with almost all the presets, is that they default to H264. The HD8 can handle x265 (aka. H265), so I'd change that because you can get much better quality per byte. Set the constant quality setting to around 22-24 on the Video tab with a Medium encoder preset.

The large file size is probably due to encoding the full resolution when your device will just be downscaling that extra resolution. The 720p preset listed above should set the target resolution in the "Dimension" tab correctly to encode to your devices resolution which should be 1280x800.

Tigershawk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 21, 2018 7:49 pm The HD8 can handle x265 (aka. H265), so I'd change that because you can get much better quality per byte.

The correct way to say this is that h265 will give you the same quality in fewer bytes, up to a point. Street talk is just that.

I didn't mean to bump this thread. I posted a zinger to the previous post, and then thought better of it, and tried to delete. For some reason, deleting posts is prohibited....so, here it is.

I am looking into adding H.265 preset(s) for additional Amazon Fire devices. I'm also thinking about renaming the Fire TV presets to Amazon Fire, since they should cover Fire TV and Fire tablets.

After some review, I'm not sure there's much to be done. There is already a Fire TV HEVC preset (albeit only constrained to 2160p60), and I'm hesitant to add 1080p30 HEVC presets at this time. While many devices are beginning to support it, encoding time is dramatically increased for not much gain in terms of size/quality. x265 continues to perform best with low bit rates or large frame sizes, and the potential confusion of having 1080p H.264 and H.265 presets side-by-side doesn't make good sense at this time.

Those interested in 1080p HEVC can of course make their own presets and we encourage everyone to use what works for them.

Some good news, I've proposed renaming the Fire TV presets to Amazon Fire, adding descriptions of compatible models including tablets, and adding a 720p30 preset for compatible devices. See https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/pull/1582. That said, 1080p HEVC is still not planned at this time due to the aforementioned reasons.