MP4 Playing Issue on Toshiba Gigabeat MEGF40

[webtechy]

Hi All,

Hardware: Toshiba Gigabeat MEGF40
Rockbox Version: r16011-080107

New to this forum. Have successfully installed RockBox. It plays MP3 files fine. However, I have a "My Videos" directory in the root, and it can see the MP4 videos within that folder, but when I go to play them the screen goes black. The buttons are still lit, but I have to flick the battery on/off to restart the Gigabeat (i.e. power switch doesn't work). I know the standard Gigabeat doesn't play MP4 files, but I was under the understanding that it can with Gigabeat.

Any help much appreciated.

Regards,

Ben.

[Llorean]

No, Rockbox cannot play MP4 videos. Nowhere on our site does it say it can. What it DOES say is that Rockbox can play MPEG 1 and 2 videos. This is covered on the wiki page for Mpegplayer, and should be in the manual as well.

MP4 videos show up because "MP4" doesn't actually mean anything but "data in an MP4 container." One common form of data in these containers is AAC music, and we can play that.

[webtechy]

OK, are their any plans to enable MP4's to be played? Most video recorders (well, the ones I have) tend to record in MP4 format.

Alternatively, slightly out of scope, but does WMP11 allow for automatic conversion of MP4's to another support format on sync (another issues getting that to work though).

Cheers,

Ben.

[Llorean]

As I said, quite clearly, "MP4" doesn't mean anything specific in terms of video format. MP4 can contain MPEG4-ASP, H.264/AVC, and probably other video formats too.

It will be necessary to convert your video to match the screen size anyway, so there's no real reason not to transcode in the process, since size conversion requires a form of transcoding anyway even if the format is preserved. Some methods of conversion known to work well are on the PluginMpegplayer wiki page, but are all user submitted.

And as I said in your other thread, questions for how to use WMP11 are out of scope of the forum. The best place to ask is somewhere offering support for that software, not somewhere offering support for completely different software.

[webtechy]

Ok, thanks for that. I was simply wondering if users of this forum may have come across a solution to WMP11 sync issues. (Rockbox does indeed change the way my computer sees the device, as when I plug it in, it pops up in vista with a different set of options such as open folder, sync photos, etc., but still not able to sync music).

EDIT: (Merge of double posts)
NB I would however suggest that a message is displayed that the file type cannot be played and the crashing issue logged.

An enhancement would be to enable MP4 playback, and dynamically resizing the video to fit the screen.

[Llorean]

Remember that these are VERY slow devices. And there is no such thing as "MP4 video" as a single format. I think you're not even sure what you're asking for at this point, but I would recommend doing some research both into what is feasible, and what file format you actually have an interest in. It's not simply a case of "enabling" something either.

Also, please read the forum guidelines. This is the second time I've had to mention them, and there's a point at which we start enforcing them when people refuse to acquaint themselves with them.

[webtechy]

Hi Llorean,

I am aware that MP4 is a container format for a number of different formats. Being a software developer, I am also aware that it obviously not something you can just "enable", but it would be nice if Rockbox was able to support (presumably have the codecs for) the most commonly contained formats within MP4 (I _assume_ most video players save an MP4 file with a common set of containing formats at a guess, e.g. MPEG4-ASP, H.264/AVC as you mentioned). I see your point with regards to dynamically resizing video ... not sure how this can be acheived ... are the more modern mobile media players simply more powerful and able to resize, or are they resized on synchronisation? It would be unrealistic to expect users to resize all their videos manually before transfering. One for the wish list if possible anyway.

However, the crashing issue still stands I think.

I detect a hint of animosity from yourself. My apologies if you think I am wasting your time. My initial impression of this forum was that it was a community where users could help each other rather than a direct request for support from the site Administrators. I must admit I am guilty of not ready the manual from cover to cover and your terms and conditions. I did have a flick through the manual but must have missed the part I was looking for*. With regards to the terms and conditions, again, I admit I didn't read them extensively - but who does? I assumed it was the average thing, search the forum first, no profanity, etc. (to which I have done).

* Perhaps this is a clue that the user experience of rockbox, although good (and better than the standard Gigabeat firmware for example), still has room for improvement?

Regards,

Ben.

[AlexP]

Hi,

The major problem here is CPU power, both for resizing, and playback of many formats.  Modern PCs have hard time decoding H.264 for instance, it just isn't going to happen on a portable player.

As for more powerful, modern players - yes, the resize/re-encode/whatever is needed happens on sync.  I have a gigabeat S in addition to my rockbox targets that has a 532 MHz CPU + FPU and it re-encodes on sync, so the players rockbox runs on (e.g. Gigabeat F 300 MHz, iriver H300 124 MHz, iPods dual 80 MHz to name a few) certainly need too have preconverted videos.  One of the strong points of rockbox to my mind is not having to use synching software - the result is you need to preconvert your videos manually.

However, we always welcome contributions, so please feel free to code something up and prove us wrong!

I agree with you on crashing incidently - it should just fail and not crash.  Perhaps one for the tracker?

The reason we are so hot on following the guidelines (the one I believe Llorean was talking about this time is the no-double posting) is that this is a technical support forum, not a community per se (whilst a community feel is nice), and so we want to keep down the noise to make them more useful.  Occasionally this can come across as annoyed, so please accept our apologies for that.  You must understand however that it gets really irritating answering questions repeatedly that are in the manual, or can be found by searching.  Rockbox is entirely volunteers, and when we have such a good manual we would like it to be used.  It just wastes our time to retype everything repeatedly because people don't look in it.  Of course it is not perfect, and we welcome improvements.

[webtechy]

Thanks for the friendly response BigBambi. Converging with my other post, perhaps if Rockbox did support WM synchronization (using P4S/MTP I believe), this would be a way of encoding/resizing the videos on synchronization?

[AlexP]

Possibly so, but this is a huge amount of work (we don't have a working software mass storage USB stack yet), and most devs actively dislike having to sync and just copy and paste, so the impetus to do the coding is not so high.  That being said, were someone to code such a solution, I'm sure it would be looked at.

[Llorean]

Actually, MTP is unlikely to be looked at. MTP is a windows only thing as it is.

Why not instead write a better syncing app for the PC? For example, one that stores a small device.info file in the root of the device containing a list of supported formats. You could, on first sync, tick of supported formats, and on all future syncs it could use the widely available ffmpeg and other common tools to convert files to one of the supported formats.

One of the main goals of Rockbox is to *enable* UMS use of these devices, and having multiple USB modes means someone has to implement other USB formats. MTP is mostly undocumented extensions on a different standard (PTP) and there's not any good open implementations of it anyway. The job of "syncing and transferring" takes place on the PC anyway, so figuring out issues with it is, generally speaking, the job of coming up with a better PC program.

By "P4S" I assume you mean "Plays For Sure"? Please don't abbreviate things outside of the absolute most common abbreviations (for example, people are more likely to know MTP than what it stands for), due to our multilingual nature, and our blind users, many people depend on machine translation of one form or the other, and these become even harder for those users to figure out. Plays for Sure is actually a DRM standard, not a transfer protocol. (Technically it means "This media device has been tested by microsoft for a list of things including UI responsiveness, etc" but in the end it means "this device supports certain DRM standards applied to WMA files" and little else)

[webtechy]

From a user perspective I would prefer something that works with what I use already, rather than requiring a separate app to be installed though really ...

[GodEater]

You always have the option of going back to the original firmware then I guess.

Seriously, I can't think of a single person on the Rockbox team who'd be keen to see us start supporting MTP - we don't like it, we don't want it.

[webtechy]

That's fair enough - it's your software after all :-)

Personally, I like it as I just plug the device in and in synchronizes my favourite and recently created mp3's etc. to my device (well, it does with my HTC phone anyway), rotates the music on the device (i.e. you have different stuff on there), and ensures there's always room left on your device, etc.

EDIT: Note, that's why I first installed RockBox as an attempt to see if it fixed the broken sync with WM11 which had stopped working with Toshiba firmware.

[saratoga]

Actually, MTP is unlikely to be looked at. MTP is a windows only thing as it is.

Well, theres libmtp on linux, which would be nice to support since various linux programs do use it.

Seriously, I can't think of a single person on the Rockbox team who'd be keen to see us start supporting MTP - we don't like it, we don't want it.

I did propose it as a potential GSOC project.  I don't use either, but iTunes and MTP support would be nice so that we support common protocols on Windows, MacOS and Linux and integrate into various playback software programs (WMP, iTunes, foobar, winamp, amarok,etc).

That said, I prefer UMS, so while I'd like to see it, I'm certainly not interested in working on it.