Entertainment For Lively Minds
ATM: video file format advice requested
I have loads of stuff from the tv that I have collected over the last few years via my Archos PVR. The files are all in avi format (but I think they are something to do with div-x), and I have put them onto dvd-r with a view to being able to view on the tv. Unfortunately I cannot get the files to play, and currently the only way I can view these is on my laptop or on tv after transferring back onto the Archos. My new tv has a usb slot, so I thought this would be a good way to view. I converted a file to mp4 format (took ages) and stuck it on a usb stick and into the tv. The tv can see the file, and knows its name, but will not play it - it just re-boots the tv after a few minutes reading the stick. It's a Sony tv, and it should be able to play mp4 files. My questions are: what am I doing wrong, and should I try converting to a different file format? The idea was to convert files to an appropriate format and burn to dvd-r, so I could just pop the disc into my blu ray player (also Sony), without having to get out my external drive, copy onto the Archos and view that way.
Anybody able to offer me any good advice? I have tried connecting my laptop to the tv, but can only get a small image in the middle of the screen, not a full size one (I've tried adjusting the resolution, but only a couple of settings seem to give any image at all)
Thanks for reading
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i western digitial media player
I'm not very technical .I bought one of these units which claims to be able to read almost any file. I load stuff onto a hard drive ,interface with the unit via usb and it connects to the TV. So far so good AVI files included.
I've got one too
I've got one too. I like it. It's even better now you can search YouTube with an iOS or Android app.
It doesn't play everything though - I've got some flv files that it won't play and many that it does play.
Remember that the extension doesn't really tell you a lot about the codec used. If you want to see the codec used, probably the easiest way it to drag it into VLC and look at the media information (which is quite easy to find). Grab a few files from different sources, find out what the DVD does play, look at the codec and convert to that format.
More additions
Just thought I'd update this sub-thread with the info that this week BBC iplayer has been added with a firmware update along with access to NetFlix. The iplayer function works like a dream - you can't save stuff though. Not tried NetFlix yet.
I just got one of those, too
I won't say it's changed my life, but it's made it a whole lot easier. No more tedious file conversions and I can watch downloads straight off a thumb drive without burning them to disc. It also seems to have cured the out-of-sync audio which for years has plagued many of my movie downloads.
Plus, the Wi Fi feature can access music files from any computer/hard drive in the house and play them through the main TV sound system. Result!
I have the older WD TV
unit-no wifi/LAN but was cheap: http://wdc.com/en/products/wdtv/
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD_TV for the various versions, I see that the Live one is only 75 quid new.
I concur with the folk above that it is a cheap solution and now adds some useful other functions over what I have on mine.
I can now do quite a lot of what it does with my Humax PVR, and all the rest with 3rd party apps on an iPad plugged into the TV and reading files over wifi, but as a cost effective way of doing what you want I suspect the WD TV family is still not a bad solution at all.
I'd like a similar box to do music over wifi, *without need for having the TV on to control it* i.e controlled from iPad. I take it there is
no WD TV controller app is there ? [edit: I see the app that JohnW was referring to exists-would be interested to know how people like it ?]
[edit: I am assuming the media player *is* WD TV ?]
Just a posh remote
The WD Live Apps for both iOS and Android are really just posh remotes. The key feature as far as I'm concerned is that you can use a qwerty keyboard for doing searches (specifically YouTube for me).
You don't get any feedback from the box to the app to show you what's going on so you still need a screen. For music, what you want seems to be a Sonos system or a Slim server device. They have mature iOS and Android apps that work very well indeed. (EDIT - I've just realised that thay isn't strictly true, there may be some feedback - I'll have a play with both apps when I get home and report back this evening)
Note that the latest WD Live is wireless but after a very short time I plugged it in because it gets very jerky if you try to use the WiFi for anything heavy (like transferring a large file) at the same time. The same goes, but to a far lesser extent, for the Sonos, particularly if you're trying to share the auxilliary input on one, via the mesh to another one.
Thanks for the, er, feedback John. As it happens
I have a "Slim server device", an SB classic of the 2005 vintage. Was rather shocked to find that the problems streaming over wifi that this has always exhibited, and which I assumed were due to our network, were not present on the new iPad, which can even stream Linn 24 bit files comfortably over wi-fi most of the time. Same network, same router etc.
Have bought a Logitech Bluetooth adapter as a short term fix (obviously doesn't do justice to losless etc), which works pretty well for 30 quid ! I will move the SB back to my flat where the wifi router, TV and music source are all within a few feet of each other and can be hard wired. We tried the obvious things liked finding a less cluttered wifi band etc etc, but the SB diagnostics still reported less than 100% at 1000 kbps which I guess is indeed not good enough for lossless. My files are a mixture of 320, lossless, and lower than 320. I don't really want to rerip them all to 320, or use LAME, and in truth I am not that fussy, as long as it sounds "nice" I am happy-and most of the time it does. I can only assume the better performance of the iPad is due to buffering to the inbuilt RAM/flash memory ???
I think we will install Ethernet asap, and eventually will get Apple TV and/or Sonos. Unfortunately powerline Ethernet won't work in the house in question due to the server and client being in electrically separate parts of the house.
Your vintage SB...
...will be a "B" Class wireless device, (11mbps vs 54mbps) - these speeds are under ideal circumstances - (5mbps vs 20mbps would be more likely) - best to plug it in to Ethernet if at all possible...my old one would struggle with FLAC files and the high end diagnostics, like you mention. I have a SB Boom which is much happier on the "G" band.
Thanks but
it is the SB3/Classic; like this model:
http://www.logitech.com/assets/32377/squeezeboxclassic-ownersguide.pdf
but still branded as Slim Devices. Page 19 of above pdf manual, says 802.11 g, and page 20 of my paper manual (dated 2006) agrees.
Though I quite agree it is behaving much more as if it were a b than a g device, and if there were a way to set this difference I'd wonder if I'd accidentally set something wrong somewhere. Ditto on the router, which as far as I know is on g but with b allowed.
There's a fairly solid wall between upstairs office router and downstairs lounge hifi, and the server side diagnostics give signal strength as only 33%. We know interference was one issue as we have seen direct effects from our microwave oven, and I have also seen it buffer when a nearby laptop boots up. However moving SB to band 6 did seem to help a bit, as the nearby networks are mostly 1 and 11.
Anyway, as you say, Ethernet is the best answer, and I'll use Bluetooth or a direct connection for the time being. I'll probably try out an Apple TV for music on wifi if we get one, just to see how it goes. I really can't see why buffering is such an issue, surely these devices could carry enough RAM for a 10 second drop out easily, and prefetch, and one could be given the option to enable it ? Or is the problem that they'd slip behind and never "catch up" and the buffer would start to fill up ? Is there a good online source for how the SB and the iPad approach these problems ?
Yeah - that's a G device all right.
...To be honest, with nothing less than an exemplary signal, streaming to the SB3 could often be a pain in the behind. It worked for me some of the time, but I ended up with the on-the-fly LAME transcoding to MP3, because the sporadic dropouts were incredibly annoying. Needless to say it was very susceptible to the microwave being switched on.
The buffer on the device is completely puny - most of the cost was in the screen and the onboard DAC, and I think they missed a few tricks with the nuts and bolts. I just treat it as a wired device now, and it's bullet-proof.
The SB Boom doesn't exhibit any of these flaws, though a 33% signal would probably test it.
Moving channels is a great idea, and if you can get your router high up or better yet, above any interior walls in the attic, signal strength should improve...
Router positioning
I think the best place to position a wireless router is where it's easiest to run cables to!
Thanks
Have found that moving to a flat in a different city where I can plug it in the router has worked fine ...hasn't dropped a bit since plugging it in last night and radio 3 sounding great into a dac magic and thence to an arcam amp and mission 770s.
We'll return to streaming at the fpo's house either when we get the Ethernet wire laid in or if we can borrow a sonos set up from a dealer just to see how the mesh idea performs.
Ie moving the squeezebox
.not moving me, I already had the flat :-)
I've had a bit of a fiddle
I've used both the apps this evening and the only thing that gets displayed on anywhere but the television screen is the "services" list such as YouTube, flickr, Picasa, vimeo etc and I'm not sure where it's getting that info from, is it the box or the web? Anyway, both apps are pretty much identical.
Some useful tips here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2011/dec/08/ask-jack-dvd
It does take an eternity to convert video files, personally I've found mpegs are perhaps the most accepted format but if possible check what format and frame size/rate and bit rate your equipment supports before conversion. Not all Sony TVs offer the same codec support so unless you know your TV supports video playback I wouldn't invest too much time in it. Some will just play mp3s and jpegs while others will play a more comprehensive range of codecs.
I had a look around on line
have you tried converting to mpeg2 instead of MP4? a couple of items I found suggest that these will play on Sony whereas MP4 might need the right codec. The MP4 codec should, I think, be H264 (i'm a bit fuzzy on this I'm afraid) This article seemed to give the best information https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2764634?start=0&tstart=0
Sony don't seem to offer much info I'm afraid but I did find an app which offers a conversion for Sony Bravia TVs if you're a Mac user
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/smart-converter/id447513724?mt=12
Its free and worked on a test conversion I did recently (not for Sony tv though). Good luck.
With regard to your laptop filling the screen, you may be able to fill the screen by changing the aspect ratio in the menu. Some screens have a "zoom" setting (sometimes called "full") which, if you are showing a 16:9 image in a 4:3 resolution will fill the screen however, you may have to manually stretch the image in the menu. Also, try all the available different resolutions. From memory, 1280 x 720 will give you the best fit. If the image is filling the internal laptop screen then you should be able to fill the tv screen. If you have black top and bottom of the laptop screen then this will be the same on the tv, assuming you are cloning the image rather than using extended desktop. Unbelievably, this is still a bit of a black art.
Black Art?
I don't think is is a black art, just a function of how good (or bad) the driver is on your laptop. Assuming that you're using an HDMI connection, I've used a few Windows 7 laptops on my television and they "just work". Even back at Vista it was a bit of a pain and it made a difference whether you made the connection before switching the video to the television but whatever I did was repeatable and made sense.
I do this a lot, not with HDMI but with VGA or DVI
HDMI presents its own EDID signal recognition problems, especially if you are splitting the signal. Using a VGA cable, computers nearly always see the connection but getting the resolution correct is the black art. A lot of machines default to 1024 x 768 (4:3 ratio) which results in a stretched, upscaled image on a 16:9 plasma. The screen spec will claim to display up to 1920 x 1080 but if you go through the resolutions in turn then they won't all display (resolutions over 1600 won't display on VGA). Even a Mac will give a list of resolutions it thinks should display but they won't all work. Sometimes the Windows settings won't give a good result and you will have to dig into the graphics card settings maybe changing refresh rate. Another problem can be showing a 16:9 image in a 4:3 output where the screen doesn't see the black crop top and bottom and the image is placed at the top of the screen rather than centrally.
Admittedly, these issues are more common on projectors rather than plasma screens but no displays I have used accept the full range of signals claimed.
I;ve just tried mpeg
and that works, though the picture quality isn't marvelous. this could be because we have a 46" tv, though.
More experimentation is needed, I think - but progress has been made.
The media player devices sound interesting, but I am wondering about the picture quality I would get from the avi files.
I was also thinking about getting an internet dongle for the tv - would the media players mean that I don't need one? I have read that Sony tvs need a specific Sony dongle - does this mean that a media player wouldn't let me access internet tv?
Thanks for all the responses, by the way.
Ignore the extension
Remember that avi is pretty meaningless because just about anything could be inside*. The media player I have gives excellent results via an HDMI cable on our 32inch set - possibly the best picture source we have - YouTube footage can be excellent.
Also, when you say mpeg works, what version are you talking about? I would expect mpeg-2 to be absolutely fine as that's what's used on normal DVDs. If it's mpeg-1 then I would expect it to be pretty poor. Once again, it's the codec that's important, not the extension.
*Gross exageration!
Dongles
I think a dongle will enable the internet facilities of your TV - most of the new internet ready TV's come set up to access You Tube, BBC iPlayer, 4OD. The dongle should allow you to get an internet signal either by wireless or ethernet.
My Sony DVD didn't require a dongle so accessing iPlayer and You Tube was fairly easy and there's a bunch more channels - mostly worthless as far as I can see. It's something of a cheek that they don't provide the dongle as part of the basic kit - bit like providing a PC without a modem.
The dongle should also enable the set up I've got, which is to set up some folders on my PC as shared, so you can then use Windows Media Player (or Mezzmo like I mention below) to play music or video files on your PC and have them stream back to your TV.
The alternative to this is to buy a separate media player box as mentioned elsewhere on this thread. Instead of using any facilities on the TV to access iPlayer or You Tube, the media player box handles this instead. Most also have hard drives and USB slots so you can store and or access files. I didn't go this route as I was happier to leave the files on my PC and using some PC homeplugs - they use your house electrical cables into distribute the internet signal so you don't have to rely on wireless.
I was expecting the signal to be slow, choppy, subject to electrical noise but it's proven just the opposite, and was pretty simple to set up. The only hard part was getting my PC to share the folders and not forget this when I powered the machine off.
I bought a Sony Walkman mp4 player
in the sales and it's ideal for playing back standard definition mp4 files which is all it really supports in video apart from Windows Media files (wmv). Simplicity itself with a video lead off Fleabay for a few quid which connects the mp4 player to the yellow, red and white phono sockets on the TV. Not cutting edge technology or brilliant picture quality but it filled a few hours over Christmas watching old music videos.
I'm no expert...
...but isn't it true that an mp4 file might not necessarily actually be an mp4 file, but rather another file in an mp4 'wrapper'?
It's all very confusing :-/
Yes
That's true for several file extensions. Fortunately some applications/devices look to see what the codec is before giving up but some don't. That's also the case for flv files and (even moreso) for avi files. As I said above, the trick is to work out what codecs work and trying to stick with them. Personally I find using the H264 output from Handbrake the best option overall but I've still found times where one device won't play the audio of a converted flv file.
I know little about networks
but I found it fairly straight forward to get my PS3 and Sony Blu Ray to recognise my PC once they were all connected to the same router. Window Media player can then be used on the PC to play files - an icon shows up on screen on any TV connected to the PS3 or DVD player.
The problem I encountered was that WMP didn't like some of the AVI of FLV files formats and wouldn't play the files. A few attempts at file format conversion proved lengthy and largely fruitless so I looked around for some software that would do a better job, and discovered a product called Mezzmo
http://www.conceiva.com/products/mezzmo/default.asp
So far it's played everything I've thrown at it, and I've not had to convert anything. You can try it on a limited trial, so worth a look if your TV will accept a network connection
Handbrake
Surely the defacto conversion/compression tool is Handbrake. It's a mature, supported application for Windows, Linux & OSX and it's free.
My objective was to avoid conversion altogether
and I'm when I tried Handbrake I couldn't get anything much to work, which I'm sure speaks much of my technical (in)ability. Mezzmo isn't free but why convert when you don't have to?
Streaming & Storage
Obviously It depends what you want to do with it but if you're planning to store files permenantly then, even allowing for the low cost of storage, the less space the files take the better - If you have 100GB of space available then better store 200 hours rather than 100. The other reason to keep the files small is for streaming. You put much less strain on your network (and of course the heads on your disk drive), especially wireless, if your files are small. Better to put the strain on the processor transport and storage systems.
I gave up on all that codec crap,
stopped running five hour recodes on a monster PC, and resigned myself to never having a working knowledge of the monstrous amount of shite that's explained in great detail in the Guides over at afterdawn dot com.
I went to Richer Sounds and spent about £75 on a Phillips DVD player that plays just about anything you can burn onto a disc. The disc you use can be a CD-R or a DVD(plus, minus or whatever you damn well like)R; the thing'll just read the disc and work it out for itself. It's even got a USB on the front panel, and happily plays files from a stick. Brilliant.
Life's too short to spend too much of it watching telly, and FAR too short to waste any of it farting around with the Godawful mess the industry has managed to make of disc formats, file formats and whatnot.
life is too short to watch telly
but spending hours listening to music or indeed on the Word blog is ok?
Not according to my GLW
who watches hours of TV but thinks spending time online (unless it's her family history) is wasted time.
Certainly, life is
much too short to spend too much time watching the idiot box.
Telly is too demanding of one's passive consumptive submission. Music and blogging are different; for a start, blogging is interactive, not passive.
As for music, it can be listened to carefully on one's own, or as an accompaniment whilst driving, walking, running or cycling, whilst sitting on a train, sitting on a plane, cooking dinner, reading a book, staring out the window in contemplative moments, relaxing in bed, relaxing in the pool, doing DIY, washing the car, traipsing around Sainsburys, doing the gardening and many other ways.