Hi linux gurus and fans

I encode my videos to play on my android phone. Wish is no problem.

However, getting videos to play on those chinese mp4 players is not easy unless they're in the AMV format.

I did find a way to encode videos in AMV from doing my research. I installed a patched version of ffmpeg-amvtools.

Howevver, the video quality is pixelated and overly saturated.

Has anyone figured a way to play avi or other types of video files which is better looking than AMV files on these players?

They advertised that it plays MP4, AVI in the ad discription. But in reality it only does AMV.

Anyway, thanks

Hmm, interesting. What hardware is that? Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMV_video_format says that AMV is used by ALi’s M5661 chips.

Since you don't say what brand/model you're talking about, it's hard to say. But your subject line kind of answers your question, doesn't it?? They are "cheap Chinese" players for a REASON. You don't get all the features/quality you want for $2....they're cheap because they're junk.

Or, they may be cheap because they include, as an extra bonus, surveillance firmware Probably not, I just have a strange sense of humor...

I'd guess that maybe you should reduce to the bone the original file before you try to convert it. There also seems to be two versions of the file.

In any case the main word in all this may be cheap. You can't fix this problem.

The player I bought is a naxa nmv-173NX


I bought it mainly for music playback. I usually listen to music on my android phone, but the problem with that is if you want to skip forward or reverse to the tracks, you'll have to turn on the phone and hit the next/previous buttons on the screen. It gets tedious after awhile.

With dedicated mp3 players we have those buttons and is much less tedius.

As for the videos, I rather encode them to play on my android phone. It supports more video formats, many screen resolutions, bitrates and etc.

Thanks everyone here for your replies.

Well, Vizio's TVs are heavily subsidized by the selling of customer data, and the retail prices take that into account, so...

Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive

What was your command-line?

Could you specify a higher quality or bitrate setting?

It seems to ignore the bitrate that I want. The program always uses a bitrate between 250k - 800k.

Someone told me that these low cost players can only play very low quality AMV files. If you try to use higher settings for the videos, you'll get a format error on the device.

Go figure, lol

Maybe they changed that but here http://www.naxa.com/index.php/nmv-173nx.html they say that only AMV is supported:

i looked yesterday, and it says elsewhere that it supports WMV (which might just be a windows-specific container format).
interestingly, there was no information about the hardware (processor/memory) to be found anywhere.

imo it's a forgone conclusion that an mp3 player that has an 1.8" screen only plays video in a very limited manner.
of course they're going to use a CPU that is only just capable enough to do what is advertised.

It only plays AMV files. It's all a lie when they say it plays other formats.

I tried WMV at first, but I got a format error. It's all a lie when these cheap players cliam to play AVI, MP4, WMV and etc...

I will never buy these again.