Since we added the HDMI profile for the Droid X, we have been receiving a large amount of questions from people who are experiencing complications with it.
The format works great with the trial version, but when you convert a full movie with this profile, you will realize that the files will not play on the Droid X. The reason for this is that Android phones don’t like files larger than 2GB in size. If you use the HQ2 profile, you might run into this with longer movies (Avatar’s 3 hour playlength for example) but in most cases, your conversions will not reach the 2GB mark, however, if you use the HDMI profile, which uses double the video bitrate, even movies of about 1 1/2 hour in size will exceed the 2GB mark, resulting in an unplayable file.
With the trial version you will not experience any issues, because in only converts 25% of each item, so a 4GB Avatar movie conversion will end up being 500MB. DVD Catalyst Free will also not run into this problem, because the video quality is a lot less (700Kbps vs the 3000Kbps if you use the HDMI profile in DVD Catalyst 4).
In the upcoming update we will have added a warning message for when files exceed the 2GB size limitation of Android.
As for the HD profiles, unless you are actually converting HD content such as HD MKV files or HD camera recordings, you will not notice much of a difference between the HQ or HD profiles. Especially with devices that have a screen resolution similar or higher than DVD resolution (Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, iPad etc) selecting an HD profile will not gain you anything except larger files.
DVD Catalyst 4 doesn’t upscale the resolution of the video file to a higher resolution if the source video screen size is lower. If you have a video file of 320×240, and the device profile uses a resolution of 800×480, the created video file will be 320×240. If the resolution of the device profile is set to 1920×1080, the video file will still be created with a size of 320×240. Blowing up (upscaling) the video during conversion just increases the pixel-size of the video, which is the same as what the video player application on your device does, so to do it during conversion is just a big waste of time, space and will actually reduce quality rather than improve it. (chapter 11 in the User Guide explains this in more detail)
Now if your video files do have a higher resolution than thast of the selected device profile, you will notice a difference.
If you are converting a 1920×1080 video file using Droid X HQ2 (854×480) the video will be resized to fit within the video resolution of the Droid X, so the created video file will end up along the lines of 854×480. If you convert the same 1920×1080 video file using the Droid X HDMI profile (1280×720), the video will be resized to 1280×720.
