AMV / MTV formats for MP4/S1MP3 players???

[Nick [D]vB]

You can now get a 1Gb MP4/S1 MP3 player for as little as £20, because of this there are lots of people buying them to watch video but due to DSP limitations the only supported formats are AMV / MTV.

I get OK results with the included convertion tool but it could be faster and I get nasty interlacing artifacts, because there is no codec selection I have to use radlight manager to try to force it to use certain combinations.

Does anyone know of any other AMV / MTV tools or a directshow encoder?

I searched Doom9 and was very surprised to find nothing about AMV at all!

If anyone wants to help develop an encoder I know many people are looking for a better solution.

More details here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_MP4/MTV_Player

http://forum.s1mp3.org/viewforum.php?f=13&sid=193d795d50a58d20ae1d018e188427b5

http://www.mympxplayer.com/viewforum.php?f=4

http://www.s1mp3.org/en

http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/7595p5.html [dev info halfway down]

Any info or ideas welcome! 8 )


Cheers,
Nick

[SeeMoreDigital]

For those who don't know... like me....


MTV Video Format
The MTV Video format was created to allow video playback capabilities on inexpensive mp3 players without increasing the cost of those players. The format operates by displaying a series of raw image frames while playing MP3 audio.

The MTV format consists of a 512 byte file header, followed by alternating image and audio frames. While the audio frames are encoded with MPEG1 Audio Layer 3 (aka MP3), the image information is stored in uncompressed raw format, according to the player's display hardware specification.

During decoding of the video stream, the audio frames are passed to the mp3 hardware decoder, while the memory pointer of the display hardware is simply adjusted to the next raw image within the video stream. While this concept does not require additional * hardware for the decoding process, it leads to huge memory requirements as no compression is applied to the image information. For this reason the storage capacity of an MP4 player is effectively much less than that of a player that decompresses files on the fly.

AMV Video Format
When playing AMV formats, there is clearly some image de/compression taking place, as can be demonstrated by a simple calculation (AMV video format). The image compression is, however, low by modern standards (around 4 pixels/byte, compared with over 10 pixels/byte for MPEG2/DVD). With a resolution of 128 x 96, and a frame rate of 12 fps, a 30 minute file will be around 80MBytes in size (in this writer's experience).


Cheers

[Nick [D]vB]

Hi SeeMore, this is all new to me to!

I have the 1Gb version of this player BTW:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=13964&GroupID=0&source=MDnewsletter

at these prices ultra low definition TV is going to catch on fast... :D

[SeeMoreDigital]

Bloody-hell...... Those things really are cheap and look great fun!

It's a shame none of them appear to support AAC audio and/or the MP4/M4A container though. If they did I would buy one tomorrow :(

There are a few Nokia cell phones that support the affore mentioned formats... but don't have the storage capacity... Oh and they are expensive...

[Nick [D]vB]

They just don't have the grunt for AAC or MPEG4 based codecs 8(

I know may people will just say "go buy a proper PVP" but I think these things rock.

I didn't even know it did video until I'd read the manual! :eek:

BTW, I just found this:

http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/7595p5.html [half way down]

a guy called Stefan Burger says he is developing AMV programs but I can't get hold of him now,

maybe someone on here knows who he is?

Cheers,
Nick

[Hyper Shinchan]

Dear Jesus XD. Only in China they could create a stuff like this! My friend's father went some time weeks ago in China, and he took one of this thing XD. But he wasn't able to play video with it! Now I can understand the reason!
There are a few Nokia cell phones that support the affore mentioned formats... but don't have the storage capacity... Oh and they are expensive...
Well, there are also Sony/Ericcson, and other mobile phones that support MP4/M4A, AAC and MPEG-4 Simple in MP4, but like you said they are a little too expensive.... and there are the I-Pod 5 and the PSP, but they are also expensive... well, they playback AVC...

[Nick [D]vB]

I'm amazed they got it to display compressed video at all considering the AJ2085 DSPs are based on a 20MHz 8-bit Z80 processor!

[wladston]

indeed - :) the clock can go up to 60mhz :)

I'll place some relevant links from our wiki at wiki.s1mp3.org :

http://www.s1mp3.org/wiki/index.php/Video_encoding -> best way to encode videos

http://www.s1mp3.org/wiki/index.php/AMV -> information about the AMV format

I searched AMV later, deeply. All I could find is on the wiki page.

[SeeMoreDigital]

What is the maximum input video resolution of these devices?


Cheers

[wladston]

As far as now, 160x120, the new 1.8 inch screen players. They seen to mainly support 4:3 videos ...