Reading Text files as images with large font on JXD 951 480x272 mp4 player
This is an additional section to the JXD 951 Quick User Review / Manual / Notes blog post.
How to Convert txt files to jpgs with large font and grey background for Easy-on-eye reading
Ebook (or rather .txt files) reading is an important requirement for me. As mentioned earlier the small font and white background of the Ebook facility of JXD951 makes it somewhat unusable for me.
Tried out an interesting solution. Steps involved are as follows:
a) Convert txt file to jpg. Seems to be quite a common technique. ebook to Images (freeware) (http://www.merlinsoftware.com/ebook/index.htm) does an outstanding job of this. Settings to be used for JXD 951 are as follows:
ebook to Images s/w has Creative Zen Vision W as a player option, whose picture size defaults to 480x272.
Alternatively you can choose Custom and then specify the output resolution as 480x272
Set ImageType as JPG
Open the text file (Using Open ebook).
Set tabbed options as:
Text->Encoding option as UTF-8 (instead of Auto) to get accents and umlauts. And use Ignore trailing returns to ensure that line separators are recognised properly.
Font->Arial 12 (Makes it very easy to read)
Output -> InEachFolder: 100
Image -> PageNumbers: checked
Image -> Background: Point to a jpg file with grey (or some other color) background of 480x272 size.
Now 'Convert To' converts the text file into jpg pictures and places the output folder on the Desktop.
Note that almost all settings are saved when the program exits. On restart, it defaults to SanDisk. Change that to Custom and all the old settings are back except Text->Encoding which has to be reset to UTF-8 (if required). [For techies: you can edit the xml settings file in Program Files folder of ebook to Images, to add a player entry for JXD 951 and also make it the default. This ensures that restart of program brings up JXD 951 settings right away.]
The jpg files view very well on the player. It is quite a visual treat and I am so happy about being able to choose my easy-on-eye background and no-squint font :-)
But there is a problem. JXD 951 has just one bucket (folder) where you need to put all jpg files (and video files). Putting more than 100 files, say 200 files, in this folder slows down opening of the Photos folder substantially. And the information does not seem to be cached, so everytime the Photos folder list has to be shown, even when you return back to the folder after viewing a photo, you have to wait for some time. This can be quite an irritant. Note that once the folder is opened, scrolling through the list seems to have the same speed as with fewer files.
Even if you go upto 300 files and tolerate the slow open folder speed, the entire book may be 1500 files and that's just one book. So one may have to do a lot of regular transferring of pictures from PC to player.
The bug described below has been fixed in ebook to Images version 0.9.13.
[Old Bug: Note that ebook to Images s/w seems to have a boundary condition bug. It crashed when it finished a book on exactly 300 pages, failing to copy last folder (50 pages or 100 pages) to destination directory (from temp directory, I guess). Workaround is to create all pages in one directory and then manually move them into sub-directories.]
b) A workable, but not entirely hassle-free solution to the practical response limit of 100 odd files in picture/video folder, is to make a video file of, say, 100 to 200 jpgs with a 4 second delay between each jpg (slide-show video). Assuming 150 jpgs per ebook-video, and limiting ourselves to 100 video files in the video/photo folder gives us 15,000 jpg files without affecting responsiveness of player much. If we assume an average of 1500 jpgs per ebook, we can have 10 ebooks (as ebook-videos) in the video/photo folder. And we could have a similar additional 10 ebooks (as ebook-videos) on the SD card. That makes the situation a lot more acceptable. [I have not properly calculated the file size of the ebook-video for 1500 jpg files but I guess it would be around 200 MB (DivX). So a 2 GB SD card would hold around 10 ebook-videos, but my 1 GB built-in flash would hold only 5 ebooks :-(.]
Before I get into the details of how such videos can be created, let me say something about the comfort factor while viewing such ebook-videos.
On playing the video you need to press the Play/Pause button to pause the video on page 1. Immediately the Play bar appears on the bottom of the screen obscuring the bottom 20% or so of the text-jpg page. But the play bar automatically goes away in 10 seconds, allowing the whole page to be viewed. Usually the reading of the first 80% of the text-jpg page takes more than 10 seconds so one does not have to wait for the play bar to go away. However it is a distraction and viewing jpg pictures (instead of jpg-video) is much more comfortable as one just uses Forward or Back to go to the next or previous picture.
While exiting the video if you save the bookmark (one bookmark across all videos), then you can resume the video by pressing M from the video files list and then choosing Resume. Note that on resumption the video quickly moves on to the next page, so it may be better to go to a previous page and then bookmark it while exiting.
Fast forward and Fast backward help to quite quickly (at forward: 8 or backward: 8) move through the video. [Note that blogspot trips up on two consecutive Greater-than or Less-than signs and so I am using forward/backward].
On the whole, while it is certainly more cumbersome that viewing the text-jpg pictures, viewing the text-jpg video with play/pause is not too bad.
If you are still interested :-), here is how to make these ebook-videos:
Use the ImageToAvi freeware (http://www.aswsoftware.com/products/imagetoavi/imagetoavi.shtml) with the following settings:
Border Size Width & Height: 0
Zoom in: Unchecked
Maintain Aspect Ratio: Default (Checked)
Pixed format: Default (24 bit)
Output:
File: Specify file name as required.
Width: 480
Height: 272
Frames per second: Default (29.97)
Repeat each frame: 120 (Results in picture duration of 4 secs)
[100 for 3.33 sec, 150 for 5 sec]
Include Audio: Default (Unchecked)
These settings will ensure that the program will just string together the jpg's (each repeated 100 times to produce the delay) without doing any zoom in/zoom out. Thus the text clarity in the jpg picture will be retained in the jpg-video.
After clicking 'Compile Images' button, the Video compression dialog pops up. Settings for it are:
Compressor: DivX 6.8 Codec...
Press OK on dialog. That's it. Output video will be created. Due to DivX compression the output video size is not too big - around 23 MB for 180 jpgs.
As the output video is an avi(DivX) video of 480x272 res. it is perfectly suited for JXD 951. The video can straight-away be transferred to the player.
4 second duration for jpg viewing seems to be the sweet spot. 3.33 secs resulted in quite a few misses while reading. I had to be very alert when I was pressing Play/Pause. 5 seconds duration made me wait a little as I was Playing to go to next page. 4 seconds felt OK both from not requiring to be very alert and also not feeling that it was taking time to go to the next page (after resuming from Pause).
The text clarity in the output videos is comparable to the text clarity of the jpg pictures.
Photos to video
The above details on creation of ebook-video can be used to create a slide-show video from jpg photographs.
Adding Audio to Slide-show video or even ebook-video
If you want to add audio, you need to provide ImageToAvi a wav file. mp3 files can be converted to wav using the Audacity freeware (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Just open the mp3 file in Audacity and then Export as Wav.
The output video file of ImageToAvi, when given an audio wav file additionally as input, is quite large. To reduce size you can input the video to Super video converter (mentioned earlier) with the following settings:
a)Check stream copy in Video section [This will ensure that the DivX input video is directly copied to the output video]
b)In the Audio section, you can change the sampling rate to 44,100 and then set the mp3 option to 128 kbps. [By default the sampling rate is 22050 with max mp3 bitrate as 64kbps].
Now you can convert the video. Super stores the output video in an Output folder in its Program Files directory. You need to pick it up from there and copy onto the player.
Web Links
JXD mp4Nation forum: http://www.mp4nation.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17&sid=99950763b2be8530b0fdb639525f719a
JXD section of mp4global.com: http://www.mp4global.com/jxd-mp4---pmp-player.html
English version of JXD web site: http://www.jxd.cc/en/Index.html
Super video converter (freeware): http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
ebook to Images (freeware): http://www.merlinsoftware.com/ebook/index.htm
ImageToAvi (freeware): http://www.aswsoftware.com/products/imagetoavi/imagetoavi.shtml
Audacity Sound editor (freeware): http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Suggestions/Comments
Any suggestions/additions/corrections are welcome. Please post to the blog.
How to Convert txt files to jpgs with large font and grey background for Easy-on-eye reading
Ebook (or rather .txt files) reading is an important requirement for me. As mentioned earlier the small font and white background of the Ebook facility of JXD951 makes it somewhat unusable for me.
Tried out an interesting solution. Steps involved are as follows:
a) Convert txt file to jpg. Seems to be quite a common technique. ebook to Images (freeware) (http://www.merlinsoftware.com/ebook/index.htm) does an outstanding job of this. Settings to be used for JXD 951 are as follows:
ebook to Images s/w has Creative Zen Vision W as a player option, whose picture size defaults to 480x272.
Alternatively you can choose Custom and then specify the output resolution as 480x272
Set ImageType as JPG
Open the text file (Using Open ebook).
Set tabbed options as:
Text->Encoding option as UTF-8 (instead of Auto) to get accents and umlauts. And use Ignore trailing returns to ensure that line separators are recognised properly.
Font->Arial 12 (Makes it very easy to read)
Output -> InEachFolder: 100
Image -> PageNumbers: checked
Image -> Background: Point to a jpg file with grey (or some other color) background of 480x272 size.
Now 'Convert To' converts the text file into jpg pictures and places the output folder on the Desktop.
Note that almost all settings are saved when the program exits. On restart, it defaults to SanDisk. Change that to Custom and all the old settings are back except Text->Encoding which has to be reset to UTF-8 (if required). [For techies: you can edit the xml settings file in Program Files folder of ebook to Images, to add a player entry for JXD 951 and also make it the default. This ensures that restart of program brings up JXD 951 settings right away.]
The jpg files view very well on the player. It is quite a visual treat and I am so happy about being able to choose my easy-on-eye background and no-squint font :-)
But there is a problem. JXD 951 has just one bucket (folder) where you need to put all jpg files (and video files). Putting more than 100 files, say 200 files, in this folder slows down opening of the Photos folder substantially. And the information does not seem to be cached, so everytime the Photos folder list has to be shown, even when you return back to the folder after viewing a photo, you have to wait for some time. This can be quite an irritant. Note that once the folder is opened, scrolling through the list seems to have the same speed as with fewer files.
Even if you go upto 300 files and tolerate the slow open folder speed, the entire book may be 1500 files and that's just one book. So one may have to do a lot of regular transferring of pictures from PC to player.
The bug described below has been fixed in ebook to Images version 0.9.13.
[Old Bug: Note that ebook to Images s/w seems to have a boundary condition bug. It crashed when it finished a book on exactly 300 pages, failing to copy last folder (50 pages or 100 pages) to destination directory (from temp directory, I guess). Workaround is to create all pages in one directory and then manually move them into sub-directories.]
b) A workable, but not entirely hassle-free solution to the practical response limit of 100 odd files in picture/video folder, is to make a video file of, say, 100 to 200 jpgs with a 4 second delay between each jpg (slide-show video). Assuming 150 jpgs per ebook-video, and limiting ourselves to 100 video files in the video/photo folder gives us 15,000 jpg files without affecting responsiveness of player much. If we assume an average of 1500 jpgs per ebook, we can have 10 ebooks (as ebook-videos) in the video/photo folder. And we could have a similar additional 10 ebooks (as ebook-videos) on the SD card. That makes the situation a lot more acceptable. [I have not properly calculated the file size of the ebook-video for 1500 jpg files but I guess it would be around 200 MB (DivX). So a 2 GB SD card would hold around 10 ebook-videos, but my 1 GB built-in flash would hold only 5 ebooks :-(.]
Before I get into the details of how such videos can be created, let me say something about the comfort factor while viewing such ebook-videos.
On playing the video you need to press the Play/Pause button to pause the video on page 1. Immediately the Play bar appears on the bottom of the screen obscuring the bottom 20% or so of the text-jpg page. But the play bar automatically goes away in 10 seconds, allowing the whole page to be viewed. Usually the reading of the first 80% of the text-jpg page takes more than 10 seconds so one does not have to wait for the play bar to go away. However it is a distraction and viewing jpg pictures (instead of jpg-video) is much more comfortable as one just uses Forward or Back to go to the next or previous picture.
While exiting the video if you save the bookmark (one bookmark across all videos), then you can resume the video by pressing M from the video files list and then choosing Resume. Note that on resumption the video quickly moves on to the next page, so it may be better to go to a previous page and then bookmark it while exiting.
Fast forward and Fast backward help to quite quickly (at forward: 8 or backward: 8) move through the video. [Note that blogspot trips up on two consecutive Greater-than or Less-than signs and so I am using forward/backward].
On the whole, while it is certainly more cumbersome that viewing the text-jpg pictures, viewing the text-jpg video with play/pause is not too bad.
If you are still interested :-), here is how to make these ebook-videos:
Use the ImageToAvi freeware (http://www.aswsoftware.com/products/imagetoavi/imagetoavi.shtml) with the following settings:
Border Size Width & Height: 0
Zoom in: Unchecked
Maintain Aspect Ratio: Default (Checked)
Pixed format: Default (24 bit)
Output:
File: Specify file name as required.
Width: 480
Height: 272
Frames per second: Default (29.97)
Repeat each frame: 120 (Results in picture duration of 4 secs)
[100 for 3.33 sec, 150 for 5 sec]
Include Audio: Default (Unchecked)
These settings will ensure that the program will just string together the jpg's (each repeated 100 times to produce the delay) without doing any zoom in/zoom out. Thus the text clarity in the jpg picture will be retained in the jpg-video.
After clicking 'Compile Images' button, the Video compression dialog pops up. Settings for it are:
Compressor: DivX 6.8 Codec...
Press OK on dialog. That's it. Output video will be created. Due to DivX compression the output video size is not too big - around 23 MB for 180 jpgs.
As the output video is an avi(DivX) video of 480x272 res. it is perfectly suited for JXD 951. The video can straight-away be transferred to the player.
4 second duration for jpg viewing seems to be the sweet spot. 3.33 secs resulted in quite a few misses while reading. I had to be very alert when I was pressing Play/Pause. 5 seconds duration made me wait a little as I was Playing to go to next page. 4 seconds felt OK both from not requiring to be very alert and also not feeling that it was taking time to go to the next page (after resuming from Pause).
The text clarity in the output videos is comparable to the text clarity of the jpg pictures.
Photos to video
The above details on creation of ebook-video can be used to create a slide-show video from jpg photographs.
Adding Audio to Slide-show video or even ebook-video
If you want to add audio, you need to provide ImageToAvi a wav file. mp3 files can be converted to wav using the Audacity freeware (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Just open the mp3 file in Audacity and then Export as Wav.
The output video file of ImageToAvi, when given an audio wav file additionally as input, is quite large. To reduce size you can input the video to Super video converter (mentioned earlier) with the following settings:
a)Check stream copy in Video section [This will ensure that the DivX input video is directly copied to the output video]
b)In the Audio section, you can change the sampling rate to 44,100 and then set the mp3 option to 128 kbps. [By default the sampling rate is 22050 with max mp3 bitrate as 64kbps].
Now you can convert the video. Super stores the output video in an Output folder in its Program Files directory. You need to pick it up from there and copy onto the player.
Web Links
JXD mp4Nation forum: http://www.mp4nation.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17&sid=99950763b2be8530b0fdb639525f719a
JXD section of mp4global.com: http://www.mp4global.com/jxd-mp4---pmp-player.html
English version of JXD web site: http://www.jxd.cc/en/Index.html
Super video converter (freeware): http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
ebook to Images (freeware): http://www.merlinsoftware.com/ebook/index.htm
ImageToAvi (freeware): http://www.aswsoftware.com/products/imagetoavi/imagetoavi.shtml
Audacity Sound editor (freeware): http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Suggestions/Comments
Any suggestions/additions/corrections are welcome. Please post to the blog.
I have a JXD cell phone A601. Can you help with a pc suite for it or maybe someother way i can read and write into the phone. I need to upload my address book into this device Please reply at rasoolaga@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteSorry Aga Rasool.
ReplyDeleteI really have no idea about JXD cell phones.
P.S. Sorry for the delay in response as well :-)
Try to use V.L.C MEDIA PLAYER it is very useful when U R playing S.D card video recorded in jxd951 by a card redder - sibaji
ReplyDeletei have jxd-951+. the problem is after inserting the 1gb card. it gave 2 option flash / sd card i accepted sd card and the player accepted and mentioned "return" and after to main icon for music it did not show any file listing the mp3 songs. can anyone help
ReplyDeleteKanan
rupees4@hotmail.com
i have jxd-951+. the problem is after inserting the 1gb card. it gave 2 option flash / sd card i accepted sd card and the player accepted and mentioned "return" and after to main icon for music it did not show any file listing the mp3 songs. can anyone help
ReplyDeleteKanan
rupees4@hotmail.com