mpg-4 portable player?

[billy beard]

i have alot of avi files on my hard-drive such as mpg-4 v3,x-vid,divx codec. my pc leads dont reach to my t.v so im looking to buy one of these----
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/02q3/020809/
what i need to know is will this be able to play them,im a bit of a noob when it comes to stuff like this and i dont want to waste my money.thanks in advance

[Prospero424]

Well, as to whether or not this player will read your AVI files, the answer is yes and no. You will have to convert your movies to a very specific MPEG4 format (simple profile, specific resolution of 352x288) this player does come with most of the software necessary to do this (the other software you need is free) but it will be very time-consuming and tedious to do this with every movie you want to watch on your TV.

What I would do is either find some longer cables capable of reaching your TV (I have used 20-foot S-Video and RCA audio cables going from my computer to the TV with excellent results, anything longer will be expensive, hard to find, and you will be risking signal degradation) or perhaps investing in one of the wireless A/V broadcasters availabe, which broadcast the signal from your computer's A/V outs on a UHF frequencey that you can pick up on your TV's antenna (I have heard that the quality is not the best this way, but it is acceptable to most people).

You should be able to find either the cables you need or the broadcaster at Radio Shack or any other local electronics supply store or on the internet. I can guarantee you that either one of these solutions will be cheaper and look better than what that device will do for you. The only reason I would get that thing is if you want to be able to watch movies while you are traveling or away from home and don't have a laptop.

Hope this helps you,

Prospero

[billy beard]

thanks for that its saved me quite a bit of money.looks like a set of extra long leads is the order of the day.the only gripe i've got with using leads is that on my wisescreen tv the avi movies are very thin and i cant seem to stretch them to fill the screen.

[Prospero424]

Just to be sure that I understand you correctly, when you say they are squished, do you mean that the aspect ratio is wrong (as in, are the character's feature's out of proportion, elongated, or what have you)? Or do you mean that the picture simply doesn't fill the screen, but looks okay otherwise? I'm assuming the latter.

Well, unfortunately them's the breaks when you buy a widescreen TV, if the media you are playing wasn't created using a widescreen format (16:9 aspect ration as opposed to 4:3), they aren't going to fill the screen. You could get into editing the files and re-encoding them in a diffferent aspect ration, but that would stretch the picture and make all of your films look REALLY funky, which in my opinion is worse than looking squished.

The only way around this is to only download, rent or create movies that are in a widescreen or letterbox format, which I greatly prefer anyway, so it's up to you man.

Good Luck,

Prospero