Archos AV 700 VIDEO Creating MPEG-4 Video Files with your Computer

VIDEO – Creating MPEG-4 Video Files with your Computer

How to create an MPEG-4 video ﬁ le

Video ﬁ les 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 Proﬁ le or WMV9 Simple

Proﬁ le format, a transformation operation must be done in order that these video ﬁ les 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 ﬁ rst method is very simple and merely requires

that you synchronize a video ﬁ le 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 re-

encode. The second method, though it requires some learning, will allow you to have much more control over the

ﬁ nal quality of the re-encoded (converted) video ﬁ le. It is described below. There are other tools available on the

Internet, some free and some for sale, that can also convert your video ﬁ les into the appropriate MPEG-4 video

ﬁ le 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 Proﬁ le .AVI

video ﬁ les. 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 ﬁ le. The ﬁ le will be scaled in order to be played back properly.

If your video ﬁ le is not an MPEG-4 Simple Proﬁ le .avi ﬁ le 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 ﬁ le that is MPEG-4 Simple Proﬁ le 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 ﬁ le 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 ﬁ le into another. This is a general purpose transfer and cleanup utility which

has many options allowing for even the most difﬁ cult 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 ﬁ nd 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 ﬁ le. It sets all the parameters for Virtual Dub

speciﬁ cally to create a video ﬁ le in the right size and format to be read by the AV 700. When you run it for the ﬁ rst

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.