Hi there.

I just bought a 4GB Creative Zen and I am having a little trouble with movies.

I use the following to convert:
And I add the movies by doing:
The video plays fine, but I cannot fast forward or search through the movie. I have been googling for a while now and haven't dug anything up yet.

I run Debian Etch, and I had to install libmtp from source. Gnomad2 didn't seem to work for me, so I would appreciate if you didn't advise that I install it.

I'm assuming it's a conversion problem, but it could have something to do with mtp? The videos that came on the device are able to be rewinded etc. I'm just confused.

I looked at the output of 'mplayer -v {videofile}' and under 'stream header' it had

FCC: xvid (64697678) - for video already on device
FCC: XVID (44495658) - for video I converted

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, I may be clutching at straws here.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Edit: I just retrieved an original file from the device using mtp-getfile, then I renamed it and sent it back using mtp-sendfile and I had the same problem! So it must be something to do with mtp. Any ideas?

Check out the -forceidx flag in mencoder. I've seen this before, when the index doesn't get built/is corrupted. That will put an index back in the file, which will enable FF/RW.

Thanks for the reply. I can play the file after I've converted it with mplayer and the index is fine. So I don't think -forceidx will do anything.

There were video files on the device which came with it when I bought it and I can fast forward those videos fine. However, I transferred one of those files from the device to my computer and renamed it. I then transferred that file back to the device and it is unable to fast forward etc. Hence, something is going wrong when I transfer these files to the device. I just don't know what.

From what I've read, the device is an MTP device so I tried to look for libmtp in aptitude but it wasn't there, so I had do install the source package from the libmtp website. Once installed, it left a bunch of executables:

mtp-delfile - deletes files from device
mtp-files - lists files on the device
mtp-getfile - gets a file from the device
mtp-sendfile - send a file to the device

There are more, but these are the ones ive used. So when I use 'mtp-sendfile' it does something to the file which won't let me fast forward. I'm clueless.

Hi,
The problem is mtp-sendfile doesn't send any meta-data describing the file, it seems the Zen needs the track length to handle FF/RW.

Sending with mtp-sendtr instead -

/usr/local/bin/mtp-sendtr u2.avi u2.avi
libmtp version: 0.3.3

PTP: Opening session
u2.avi,u2.avi,(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),00,0,0
Sending track u2.avi to u2.avi
type:avi,8
Title> U2
Album> U2
Album artist> U2
Artist> U2
Writer or Composer> U2
Genre> rock
Track number> 1
Year> 2004
Length> 228
Sending track:
Codec: Audio Video Interleave
Title: U2
Album: U2
Album artist: U2
Artist: U2
Writer or Composer: U2
Genre: rock
Year: 2004
Track no: 1
Length: 228
Storage ID: 0
Sending track...
Progress: 25604828 of 25604828 (100%)
New track ID: 94879
Album doesn't exist: creating...
success!
PTP: Closing session

resolves the problem.