Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

MP4 Playing Issue on Toshiba Gigabeat MEGF40

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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.

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