Fuze+ Video Requirements

Hi, I got my fuze+ coming in the mail.  I got it for a nice price of 48 bucks for the 8 gig version directly from Amazon.   What I would like to know is what is the real battery life when playing a movie?  Is it possible to watch a full length two hour movie on it?  Sandisk claims five hours of course but is two and a half hours a more realistic guess?  I have a clip+ and love it.  I have always got about five or six hours of life out of it no matter the bit rate of the mp3s or how much I play with it. 

I really didn’t need to upgrade but the video features and the price sold me.  I already have a PSP that I can watch movies on as well but this just sounds more portable to me.  I have many older mp3 players that I don’t use because they have strange bugs that make them stop working.  The clip+ is the best I ever had without weird bugs so I thought I would give sandisk a try on this new one.  I had another MP3 with a  touch pad about eight years ago.  I don’t know if believe  people on how bad the touch pad is.  I’m guessing it couldn’t be any worse than the one I had then and that wasn’t too bad.

That’s a good deal for the Fuze+.  I love it for video, the display is larger than the earlier Fuze / e200, and the image quality is great.  Battery life on the new machine is better too; you can watch a few movies before it needs recharging.  I have watched a film, powered down, watched a second while the girls were waiching cartoons, and realized that I should plug the little guy in for a charge later in the day.

The Fuze+ does have a decent battery capacity, unlike the wee Clip+, which has the limitation its diminuitive size, and a physically much smaller battery.  I typically expect 8 hours at the most on the little one.

Be sure to update the Fuze+ to the latest firmware, as it greatly improves working with the machine, and fixes the lock function, directing it to the top power button.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

how do I make the .thm file?

@alienkid10 wrote:

anyone know if Fuze+ supports cinepak?

 

jfadfe


Also how do I make the .thm file for a video?


 

@alienkid10 wrote:

anyone know if Fuze+ supports cinepak?

I seriously doubt it. Cinepak is not a commonly used format, and the Fuze+ is small and cheap. Combine these facts with the fact that there are only so many formats that can be programmed into the Fuze+, and I think the answer will be obvious.

@alienkd10 wrote:

Also how do I make the .thm file for a video?

 Look for programs that can extract jpegs from a video (such as Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Edition). That’s basically what a thm file is, a jpeg file with a different extension.

Also,

@slimmyshady wrote:

I had the same problem as “primetechv2”. I convert a movie onto the Fuze+ using SMC. I then play the movie on the player. It plays for about 12 minutes, then randomly cuts out. It did convert the whole movie, because in the videos menu on the player it says the movie is about 2 hours long. When I go to pause the movie, it pauses, but when I try to resume the screen goes black and the player freezes and doesn’t resume. When I try to skip, fast forward or resume play from the menu, the player freezes, screen goes black and I cannot resume play of the movie. This is very frustrating, as I am doing everything right, using SMC and converting everything fine. Any suggestions?

I have found that the Fuze+ desperately struggles with AVI files. This is especially true with longer movies. I suspect that it has something to do with how overly complicated an AVI file actually is. Those of you who have read the first tutorial on how to convert files for the original Fuze without SMC should know what I am talking about. Things like interweaving, OpenDML, RIFF, ect.

That said, what codecs does your *.avi file use? Unless it uses either WMV video, or WMA audio, you should be able to download something like My MP4Box Gui to instantly copy the audio and video streams into MP4 format (without loss of quality). The Fuze+ seems to love those little mp4’s.

What res does the .thm need to be in?

Well, the sample videos use 168x126, but pretty much any resolution should do. However, I should tell you that the Fuze+ will probably ignore this file, if it is named incorrectly. Let’s say that you have a video called “Attack of the Boogers.avi”. You will need to name the *.thm file as “Attack of the Boogers_large.thm”. Without the “_large” part, the Fuze+ just doesn’t realize that it is actually supposed to be a thumbnail for that video, and just ignores it.

Hello I just want to know if we can any video be converted this way?Thanks.

as long as it is not drm protected. 

I have successfully converted videos (e.g. TED talks) to Sansa Fuze+ on an ubuntu machine using ffmpeg.

If you are not familiar with Linux bash scripts you had better stop reading here.

I have a directory where I collect the files to be converted, with two sub directories named “done” and “out”

The following bash script does the work:

#! /bin/bash
for file in *.mp4
do
    ffmpeg  -i “$file” -s 320x180 -vf pad=320:240:0:20 “out/$file”
    mv – “$file” done
done
when the script is done the originals are found in subdirectory “done” and the files to be moved to my Fuze+ in directory “out”.

I hope somebody else find this useful.

Best regards

Jeppe

PS.

ffmpeg -version

ffmpeg version N-31760-g84a6abd, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Aug  5 2011 00:03:34 with gcc 4.4.5
DS

I also came accross some videos in ogg format. Since the Sansa Fuze+ player don’t know much about Theora and Vorbis, I needed to specify the codecs. These files were also in aspect ratio 4:3 so no need to pad.

Please find below the scripts for *.ogv files:

#! /bin/bash
# This is for Ogg Video (need to change codecs, Sansa don’t know about Theora/Vorbis)
for file in *.ogv
do
    ffmpeg  -i “$file”  -s 320x240 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libfaac “out/$file.mp4”
    mv – “$file” done
done

As before, I’m running Ubuntu, currently 10.10

Regards

Jeppe

Sometimes the fuze+ don’t play the resulting mp4 container files properly. Using the avi container format is a nice workaround. Also I needed to change the audio codec to mp3, please see below.

#! /bin/bash
# This is for aspect ratio 16:9, sometimes the fuze+ player don’t play mp4 files properly
# so I use .avi container instead with mp3 audio
for file in .mp4
do
    ffmpeg  -i “$file”  -s 320x180 -vf pad=320:240:0:20 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libmp3lame "out/${file%%.
}.avi"
    mv – “$file” done
done
read -p “Please press Enter to continue” yn

Best regards

Jeppe

halonachos117 wrote:The Fuze+ can NOT play MPEG-4 AVC video streams which use more than one reference frame. If you do have two or more reference frames, you must convert/reconvert the file, so that there is only one reference frame.

I take what I said back. IDK if I had just accidenly converted a bad video or if there was something Sandisk didn’t mention in thier Firmware updates, but it seems that the Fuze+ can play as many as 7 reference frames, although the video does sometimes seem to freeze. Stop the video with the back button, then resume to fix this issue.

I have found the fuze+ works well with xvid avi and mp3 320 bitrate. FPS can be anything from 23.976 to 29.97. I’ve only done small files less than 100 megs.

I just want to load photos not videos

Photos are a real treat in the Fuze+.

Several paths are open to you.  I use microSDHC cards, in a standard SD card adaptor, in my Nikon.  You guessed it!  Plop the card into the Fuze+, and the photos are available without conversion or special formatting.

The Sansa Media converter utility allows you to build collections of photos, rename them, and transfer to the Fuze’s Photos folder automatically.

I have transferred video directly to the Fuze+ using Windows Media Player.   The videos play beautifully and are correctly formatted to the screen.  I would dare guess that Photos can be transferred from the Pictures folder in Wndows Media Player.  Better try that later, come to think of it.  I’ve been quite comfortable with the SMC, but I’ll give WiMP a whirl.

Incidentally, navigating with the touchpad is great with the touch pad, easy to sweep about.

Bob  :stuck_out_tongue:

Is there any converter or app or whatever that allows me to set even arbitrary bookmarks for videos? “Resume playing” even when it works, is not the same thing as a bookmark. And it seems like the fuze+ cannot “remember” more than one video resume-play point even if it works. I end up holding down the fast-forward touch-point and watching the vid speeded up for a long time to get to where I left off.

It’s such a pain that I’d be glad to set up longer videoswith “bookmarks” every ten minutes or so prior to loading on the fuze+, just to avoid the frustration of fast forwarding every time. Is there a way to do that without breaking up the video into chunks? (I searched the board archives but found no mention of video bookmarking for the current firmware.)

For those interested in easy-to-use video converters:  I use Video4Fuze and have been almost aklways happy with the outcome. I can use DVDVideoSoft (freeware) to play youtube videos or convert other file formats, and the Internet Archive has a huge trove of public domain videos and movies in OGG and AVI formats. Here is a good place to start: http://archive.org/details/feature_films

Notes to Sansa: “Resume playing” is no good when you (a) use the sleep function; and (b) fall asleep for book, podcast, or video, before the exact moment the timer shuts off.

     I have the sansa fuse+ I was seriusly considering returning it because I couldnt get it to play videos.   I tried many different settings in handbrake and none worked for me.  video4fuse is set at the wrong resolution and I couldnt get it to work.  psp video9 didnt work for me eithier.  I couldnt figure out open video converter eithier.  But when I tried “Any Video Converter ULTIMATE”  I finnally got it to work!!!  Horay!!!  with  Any Video Converter Ultimate, I selected “sansa fuse .mp4”  added my .avi video file and set the output to my fuse video folder. and I ran the conversion.  When it was finished an error message came up, but dont let that fool you.  in my folder was a new folder called sandisk sansa and in that folder was was ‘my video’_mpeg4.aac,  ‘my video’_mpeg4.avi, ‘my video’_mpeg4.m4v, ‘my video’_mpeg4.mp4  all three video files were roughly the same size, and the aac file was much smaller  actually it was 0 since it was a silent video generated from a gif.  Okay I deleted the three extra files and just left the mp4, and it still works.  I would of never figured this out if it wasnt for this forum, and this thread.

@slotmonsta wrote:

The SMC is NOT required to convert videos for the Fuze+. Any video converter of your choice can be used. Here are the video file requirements for Fuze+

 

**Video format for Fuze+

File container: *.mp4

Video CODEC: H.264/AVC Baseline Level 2.0

Bit rate: 1,000 Kbps**

 

**30 FPS

Width: 320 pixels

Height: 240 pixels

Audio CODEC: AAC version 4 LC

Bit Rate: 192 Kbps

Channels: 2 (stereo)**

 

Forum Admin

slotmonsta

When you say  “AVC baseline” are you talking about Profile or Level? I noticed the video that came with the Fuze+ is Level 5.1 which is high but the bitrate was very low.

I used Level 5.1, Profile: Base to encode a video that Media Converter wouldn’t touch. (YouTube derived).

Encoder was Ripbot264, which left the AAC audio untouched, which Media Converter would have transcoded to MP3 as it muxes to an AVI container… RipBot was set to mux as MP4.

 Which played just fine.