Chinese MP4 player - all great except video play - help! Please!!

[ilovefilms]

I bought my daughter a touch screen MP4 player from China (model DT-4-BLK ) - OK scold me later... Everything works cool on it and I have easily figured out all the features without use of the weak instruction guide. I am giving it to her for her birthday in a couple weeks so have been loading it with her songs just fine. I wanted to put music videos on it also. I have downloaded the AMV converter program that everyone talks about and have converted several videos. Then I drag them from my computer onto the player but when I touch Video they don't show. They are there when I look at them from my computer via the USB connection so I know they are on the MP4 player but don't know why they are not showing in a video list to choose from. Also what should the file extension be and how can I check it? Looking at the file I see Chris Brown music video and MPEG-4 or advance media video but can't see the exact extension. Any help to get me in the right direction is greatly appreciated. There seems to be a wealth of knowledge out here and hopefully you can pass some on to me (besides telling me not to buy from China).

[poisondeathray]

You might have a file format/codec incompatibility

On your PC folder options => view => uncheck hide folder extensions for known file types

Is this the player? http://www.evertek.com/viewpart.asp?Auto=37818

The video files have to be converted to 320x240.

"Supports MPEG-4(AVI) movie format" This is MPEG4 - Part 2, i.e DivX and XviD, NOT the .mp4 container or AVC/h.264 video. They have to be .AVI

[jman98]

Some of these players don't really and truly support MP4. They support something called AMV (you found a converter) and the MP4 stuff is just an outright lie to sell the player. Here's some info on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMV_video_format
I would guess that your files need to end in .AVI or .AMV or maybe even .MP4 although they are certainly NOT truly MP4 files.

Typically supported resolutions on these players are VERY small. 128x128 and something like 200x96 (don't remember exactly) are possible. At the resolution and frame rates these players support, don't expect miracles. They use small resolutions because it saves money on screen size and the small size helps to hide how crappy the video is that it can play.

[ilovefilms]

You might have a file format/codec incompatibility

On your PC folder options => view => uncheck hide folder extensions for known file types

Is this the player? http://www.evertek.com/viewpart.asp?Auto=37818

The video files have to be converted to 320x240.

"Supports MPEG-4(AVI) movie format" This is MPEG4 - Part 2, i.e DivX and XviD, NOT the .mp4 container or AVC/h.264 video. They have to be .AVI

Thanks Poisondeathray. The files that were converted were .mp4 & .amv so guess I need to find a program that converts to 320x240 and avi. The converter they recommend doesn't seem to do this.... hmm

[classfour]

The Chinese mp4 players that I've had my hands on typically use .amv files, but each was different in the encoding. I do recall that I had to start by doing a format of the memory, then had to drag the encoded files into a sub-folder (i.e. video). to get the thing to play.

[poisondeathray]

@ilovefilms - I would use whatever software came with the player, but if that isn't working...

what format are your source files? (what container and codec for audio and video? if you don't know, use mediainfo to determine this)

Virtually all encoders can easily encode to XviD and resize to 320x240. That website doesn't seem to specify a required frame rate (e.g. 15fps or 30fps seem to be common for portable players). I suggest avidemux or virtualdub to do this. There are many guides here if you do a quick search. If you need any more help just ask.

[guns1inger]

BAMVC is the only freeware AMV converter I could find. It uses a modified ffmpeg for encoding. While many of these players now have the larger 320 x 240 screens, they won't actually handle video at that resolution, with the largest resolution usually being 208 x 176. BAMVC certainly seems to encode, however the player I tried it on refused to play anything encoded by it, and would only play videos encoded by the supplied software.

You can find it here : http://www.bytessence.com/bamvc.html

[dts]

I also bought an mp4 player and the software produces amv files that dont work
When I explored the contents of the players memory-- I found an "RAR" file ---- I wondered what an "RAR" file was doing inside the player so I downloaded "Tugzip" from majorgeeks and for safety copied the file from the player to my hard disk--opened it with tugzip and lo and behold an application that I loaded to the computer that converts virtually any file to 320 x 240 avi for my player
Hope this helps someone as I was going round in circles trying to figure it out
I am now a happy person

[ilovefilms]

I didn't find mine on the player but I did get a link to probably the same program on the internet. I actually already had downloaded it before but it was in chinese so I had no clue about using it. The link was to the english version. I used this program and it perfectly converted all the videos I was trying to use. Now everything is working great with the player and I too am a very happy person. I'm even planning to buy another one of these players for myself.