Archos 500717 User Manual - Page 17

33 9 VIDEO - Creating MPEG-4 Video Files with your Computer How to create an MPEG-4 video file Video files that come from your digital camcorder, sent to you via e-mail, or which are freely available on the Internet are encoded in many different ways. If not already in the proper MPEG-4 Simple Profile or WMV9 Simple Profile format, a transformation operation must be done in order that these video files can be played by the AV 700. This transformation process is called re-encoding. There are basically two ways to do this; 1) Use the Synchronize button in Windows Media® Player 10 or 2) Use the PC tools which are available on the AV 700's hard drive. The first method is very simple and merely requires that you synchronize a video file in your Media Player library to your AV 700. You do not have much control in this converting process though and Windows Media® Player determines which video types it will and will not reencode. The second method, though it requires some learning, will allow you to have much more control over the final quality of the re-encoded (converted) video file. It is described below. There are other tools available on the Internet, some free and some for sale, that can also convert your video files into the appropriate MPEG-4 video file format for the AV 700. See the web site www.mpegmobile.com for a list of a few of them. PC Tools The AV 700 is delivered with two Windows® based programs that allow you to create MPEG-4 Simple Profile .AVI video files. They are the MPEG-4 Translator and Virtual Dub™. The MPEG-4 Translator will call the Virtual Dub program and give it the correct parameters to encode your video from its original format, .avi or .mpg (mpeg 1), and then encode it into an MPEG-4 SP .AVI file. The file will be scaled in order to be played back properly. 33 34 9.1 Installing the PC Software If your video file is not an MPEG-4 Simple Profile .avi file of the proper size, you will need to re-encode it using the following utilities. For the AV 700, you will need to create an AVI file that is MPEG-4 Simple Profile with a resolution up to 720 x 576 (depending on frame rate) and a sound track that is stereo MP3 or WAV. In actuality, in all cases, a resolution beyond 640x480 does not add any advantage. MPEG-4 codec (Compression/Decompression) In order for MPEG-4-Translator to compress the video in a file of the format MPEG-4 SP that the AV 700 can read, it requires an MPEG-4 codec to be installed on your computer.If you do not have the approporiate codec installed, MPEG-4 Translator will tell you on start up which codec it requires. You will be able to download it for free from the Internet. Virtual Dub™ A utility for transcoding one video file into another. This is a general purpose transfer and cleanup utility which has many options allowing for even the most difficult video translations. When you install it with the ARCHOS™ Installation Utility, it will automatically unzip. It will prompt you to save it to C:\Program Files\VirtualDub. You should use this default directory location. Otherwise you will have to instruct the MPEG-4 Translator program where to find it. For more information on Virtual Dub™ see the website - http://www.virtualdub.org. MPEG-4 Translator This program, developed by Archos, is a "Front-end" for the Virtual Dub program. It has a simple interface which you use and it then tells Virtual Dub how to process the video file. It sets all the parameters for Virtual Dub specifically to create a video file in the right size and format to be read by the AV 700. When you run it for the first time, the MPEG-4 Translator will need to locate the Virtual Dub program. If you did not install Virtual Dub in the default location, you will have to show the program where Virtual Dub is. If you forget, Windows® will give you an error when you try to launch it. 34