Video format

[soleambeati]

Well, I've read in iPL forums that rockbox can play .mpeg videos... and I don't know how to play them (I've a ipod nano), any help apreciate, thanks

[Corius]

The video player is in early days and the last I heard it only plays video and no sound so far plus its not very fast, although I tried it out on my 5G, a nano might be faster. I believe it has to be a mpeg1 file with the .m2v extension

[sharpe]

It's actually mpeg2 encoded video, hence the extension '.m2v'.
Also, since it's only an elementary stream, there is no audio in '.m2v' files.

[travishayes89]

i was wondering, can you encode it to play on smaller screens, but play em on a 5g

[Llorean]

Yes

[travishayes89]

the reason i was asking is because in theory it would speed it up if its smaller.

[Llorean]

Actually, it's not a theory. It's been done.

[travishayes89]

yeah, but i was talking from my standpoint, i haven't tried that yet.

[jake5253]

I got an mpg that played *to an extent*  It was a movie (sample) I got from bit torrent and i stored on my ipod to transfer to a friend and just out of complete curiosity, i tried to play it.  the top part of the movie worked (slowly), -- you could only actually see about 1/5 of the top of the screen, the rest was just a garbled mess of color.  no sound on that, obviously.
movie details (as long as i remembered correctly what movie it was):

 *File     :  10.0 MB (10.0 MB),  duration: 0:00:53,  type: MPG,  1 audio stream(s),  quality: 47 %
 *Video :  9.19 MB,  1455 Kbps,  25.0 fps,  352*288 (4:3),  MPG1 = MPEG 1 (VCD)
 *Audio :  828 KB,  128 Kbps,  44100 Hz,  2 channels,  0x51 = Mpeg-1 audio Layer 2 [0xc0]

[Llorean]

Seeing as the plugin only officially supports (and expects) raw MPEG video streams, with no audio in the file, I'm not surprised that it didn't work properly.

[Cho03]

I got an mpg that played *to an extent*  It was a movie (sample) I got from bit torrent and i stored on my ipod to transfer to a friend and just out of complete curiosity, i tried to play it.  the top part of the movie worked (slowly), -- you could only actually see about 1/5 of the top of the screen, the rest was just a garbled mess of color.  no sound on that, obviously.
movie details (as long as i remembered correctly what movie it was)

hey man, follow this link. it tells you how to transcode your mpeg file correctly. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginMpegplayer
Now i dont know which ipod you have, but my nano plays back mpegs perfectly after being converted. I ripped 40 minutes of Kill Bill vol. 2 and converted it. I sat there and watch all of it. And like Llorean said, theres no sound yet.

[Corius]

Hmm I never knew VLC could encode video, another reason to like it. I just used some random freeware I found on google because I was only having a look at how well it worked. I'm still impressed, the rockbox developers are so detirmined!

[crescentfresh]

I got an mpg that played *to an extent*  It was a movie (sample) I got from bit torrent and i stored on my ipod to transfer to a friend and just out of complete curiosity, i tried to play it.  the top part of the movie worked (slowly), -- you could only actually see about 1/5 of the top of the screen, the rest was just a garbled mess of color.  no sound on that, obviously.
movie details (as long as i remembered correctly what movie it was)

hey man, follow this link. it tells you how to transcode your mpeg file correctly. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginMpegplayer
Now i dont know which ipod you have, but my nano plays back mpegs perfectly after being converted. I ripped 40 minutes of Kill Bill vol. 2 and converted it. I sat there and watch all of it. And like Llorean said, theres no sound yet.

Should there be sound when playing the file through VLC on your computer?  I used the bat from the wiki, and it worked very nicely to encode the file to m2v, but does that mean there's no sound any place you play it, not just on your ipod???

By the way, it looks great on an ipod photo.  Thanks for all the hard work everyone.

[soap]

m2v is a MPEG-2 Video elemental stream.
m2a is a MPEG-2 Audio elemental stream.
Mux them together and you have a .mpg audio/video file.

[dionoea]

Should there be sound when playing the file through VLC on your computer?  I used the bat from the wiki, and it worked very nicely to encode the file to m2v, but does that mean there's no sound any place you play it, not just on your ipod???

The es{...} stream output chain in VLC is used to separate elementary streams (like Video and Audio like mentioned in the previous post). If you want to have an mpeg2 file with audio + video on your PC, you should use something like --sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=600,width=...,height=...,acodec=mpga,ab=96}:std{access=file,mux=ts,url=myfile.ts} but that won't be read by rockbox' mpegplayer.