Well, I’ve read a lot that the Fuze had very week video support and that it is almost impossible to watch anything except a few short videos. Contrary to that popular notion, I have been able to watch five series of the Air anime with subtitles!! Yeah, the subtitles were ultra-tiny, the characters being not more than 3-4 pixels in height. Anyways, I got all excited about watching stuff on my Fuze so here are my main concerns:
Converting an ordinary 4:3 movie without subtitles and watching it on the Fuze in a breeze. But let’s take the most complicated case: watching 16:9 movies with subtitles is pretty tricky. So…
Let’s say I have a 1.5 Gb movie with a frame size of 704x384, that makes a 1,83 width-to-height ratio. The Sanse Fuze has a display of 224x176, which makes a 1,27 width-to-height ratio. If I convert the movie straight through the Sansa Media Converter, the output will have nasty black spaces above and below the wide movie frame. So the first thing I need to do crop the movie to the desired 1,27 ratio by cropping it to 704x553. Here I need to crop the image - cut out some of the left and right sides of the image so that the image itself does not look squeezed horizontally.
Since Sansa Fuze apparently does not support any kind of separate subtitle file format, I then need to embed the subtitles into the image physically with the desired font size.
The, when I have a 704x553 movie with embedded subtitles, I need to choose among several audio tracks (i.e. original track, translation). Only then I can use the Sansa Media Converter to place the output file into the Fuze.
So, the resulting output file on the Sansa should be cropped to 224x176 without a single blank black pixel, with readable subtitles and the chosen audio track.
Obviously, Sansa Media Converter is the last thing I need to look into in order to make it happen. Any suggestion?
