A small followup to the iRiver review I wrote a few weeks ago:
Installing the Nov. 11 upgrade will allow your H300 device to play videos! Woo!
… Ok, so it’s a tiny 220×176, 10fps-type video, but for a free device update, I think it’s a great step forward. I’m not sure why iRiver selected XviD as their codec-of-choice though (it may have been simply a licensing issue).
The recommended video specs are pretty tricky, so compressing my videos for use on the H300 quickly became a frustrating exercise in trial-and-error when I attempted it this afternoon:
File format : AVI
Codec : XviD MPEG4 (recommend XviD 1.0.2 codec)
Resolution : 220 x 176 only
Frame Rate : 10fps at Maximum
Video Bit Rate : 500Kbps at Maximum(recommend under 450Kbps)
Audio Bit Rate : 128Kbps, 44.1KHz
As with the H300 itself (and, it looks like, most of iRiver), getting this to work is a challenge. I’m not sure how many users out there have even heard of XviD, let alone are familiar with the concept of frame-rate decimation (the process by which you can reduce your video’s frame-rate from say, 30 to the required 10), and that isn’t even half of the problem here. The page suggests that you use VirtualDub to accomplish the encoding, but there are no links or clues as to where to get this software.
(For the record, I use VirtualDubMod, which you can get along with a lot of other useful ripper/encoders here.)
I was struggling with the problem for almost two hours before I came up with a 3-minute clip that didn’t spit out a “Video Not Supported. Skipping.” error. It had some major stuttering though, even at a bitrate of a measly 150Kbps. Also, the audio track (which I had re-encoded at 22,050 KHz to save space) became chipmunky and shrill. Apparently, 44.1KHz isn’t just recommended, it’s mandatory.
(Oh, and it doesn’t support audio-less videos either, in case you were wondering.)
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and posit that maybe iRiver rushed this patch, what with the iPod Photo throwing its weight around and all. Even if they hadn’t made the video support more tolerant, they could’ve at least provided a more specific guide on how to make these magic clips.
Still, I haven’t completely given up hope. The sample movie that iRiver includes (a collection of chi-novela-style pixel commercials for their various products) had a higher bitrate and longer running time than my test-clip, but it played relatively fast, so it is possible to get decent performance out of this thing.
It’s just a matter of figuring out how.
… That, or wait a few months for another firmware upgrade.