My Wife and I have both been very happy Sansa Clip owners for quite some time. I recently decided that I needed an MP3 player upgrade – so that I could sychronize my ever growing iTunes library without having to “cherry pick” specific albums as I previously did with my Clip – and therefore purchased an 8Gb Sansa Fuze + 16Gb SanDisk memory card.
One of the primary reasons that I purchased the Fuze – over the newly released 8Gb Sansa Clip – was the fact that the Fuze is advertised as having the ability to "watch your favorite video clips**".**
After spending most of my free time this week fiddling with VLC, mencoder, DivX converter, ffmpeg, Quicktime, etc. – I’ve come to the conclusion that it is simply may not be possible to convert and/or encode videos compatible with the Sansa Fuze unless you use the proprietary Windows software provided by SanDisk (and even then it seems to be an iffy proposition at best). Also, based on what I’ve read on this forum, it seems that most folks are using SMC (Sansa Media Converter) as a final step prior to uploading movies to their Fuze – even if they use another piece of software to perform a conversion.
My goal is to find the magic sequence of instructions that I can give a command-line encoder/converter like “ffmpeg” (available on Windows, Macintosh OSX, and Linux) that will allow easy, one-step conversions that can then be uploaded to my Sansa Fuze without the use of SMC.
-1- Can someone post a short fuze compatible video for testing purposes (preferably one that does not have any “audio sync” issues)? Other folks have posted various snippets of extracted video information discovered using Windows video tools, but I would like to compare that with some information garnished from Macintosh OSX and/or Linux Video software. I tried to locate the sample music video that comes included with the Fuze, but it seems to be mysteriously hidden and/or not visible when mounted as a USB drive on my Macintosh OSX notebook.
-2- Can someone from SanDisk please inform me when the propsed Sansa Fuze firmware upgrade with relaxed video codec requirements is scheduled to be released (and is there a Beta available)?
I originally posted this in the Fuze forum last week and received various helpful responses that unfortunately either required a Windows based PC and/or suggestions that required downloading and installing various pieces of video conversion and/or MTP connection software ( none of them worked ).
Anyway, thanks in advance for your time and effort…
My son just got a 4GB fuze as an early Christmas present, and I thought it was a pretty nice little mp3 player… until I tried to load a video onto it (running both Linux and OSX).
I have no problem re-encoding videos manually using whatever (extremely powerful) opensource tools are available, but from what I’ve read so far, this doesn’t seem possible with the existing (too picky) firmware.
I’m a realist - I don’t expect full-blown linux (or even mac) support, but this is a bit much.
Another Linux user here who just bought a Sansa Fuze as well. I was excited by the “proclaimed” linux support but let down when it comes to getting any sort of video on there using mencoder/ffmpeg. Even loading SMC on an XP machine was failing horribly to convert movies, sometimes crashing, sometimes “Unknown Error”, and once got stuck at 12%.
Please, pick a standard video codec / container and go with it! The device works great with everything else in Ubuntu just disappointed to find I cannot put any videos on it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it is simply may not be possible to convert and/or encode videos compatible with the Sansa Fuze unless you use the proprietary Windows software provided by SanDisk
My goal is to find the magic sequence of instructions that I can give a command-line encoder/converter like “ffmpeg” (available on Windows, Macintosh OSX, and Linux) that will allow easy, one-step conversions that can then be uploaded to my Sansa Fuze without the use of SMC.
I don’t think that’s possible, but good luck!!
People have been analyzing the SMC output and it seems that it’s in a Quicktime container, with some sort of header in the front of the file which identifies it to the Sansa. You can convert videos with any other piece of software you want to the exact same specs but they never play.
Now what’s even more interesting is that older versions of SMC were based off an engine built by some other company. (Unfortunately, due to a computer format, I can’t find the links or remember the name or the website or find my older install files…)
CURRENTLY the “better” (more stable, like that’s saying much,) version is based off an Intervideo converter.
I tried exactly what the users said to do and the avi produced did not play. The file actually showed up when in the videos but the sansa displayed the unsupported message. Im not that good in linux so im not sure how to change the command to make the video to the fuze’s specifications. Should the old Sansa View formatted videos work in the Fuze?
Video:
Video Container: Fully interleaved AVI
Codec: MPEG-4 (Simple Profile level 1 or 2)
Bitrate: Up to 512 Kbps
Resolutions: QCIF+ (224x176)
FPS: Up to 20 fps
Audio:
mp3
bitrate:128kbps
no. of channels:2
sample rate:44100khz
I tried exactly what the users said to do and the avi produced did not play. The file actually showed up when in the videos but the sansa displayed the unsupported message. Im not that good in linux so im not sure how to change the command to make the video to the fuze’s specifications. Should the old Sansa View formatted videos work in the Fuze?
Video:
Video Container: Fully interleaved AVI
Codec: MPEG-4 (Simple Profile level 1 or 2)
Bitrate: Up to 512 Kbps
Resolutions: QCIF+ (224x176)
FPS: Up to 20 fps
Audio:
mp3
bitrate:128kbps
no. of channels:2
sample rate:44100khz
I am now using the ffmpeg like the person in the ubuntu forum. Are you sure the Sansa view videos would work for the Fuze? The specifications seem to be different. The specifications I listed above are for the Fuze videos and the link you gave converts the wanted video specifications for the Sansa View. Im not really sure about changing these:
We have a Linux home, but I managed to use VMware to boot an XP image, installed SMC, fiddled with the USB connection for hours, and managed to finally put a video on the fuze ( Howls Moving Castle). Audio is horribly out of sync though and not sure it was worth the effort.
Hi, I’m trying to recodec a video for the Fuze on Linux. I’m working with Avidemux, a powerfull program for conversion and a very good gui for ffmpeg full of settings.
By now I have no success with video conversion for the Fuze but I can covert avideo with the same specifications of:
VIDEO avi container
codec DivX MPEG4 Version5 (not MPEG4 or Xvid…)
fps 20
bit to test
bitrate to test
AUDIO
codec MPEG1 Layer3 (MP3) at 44100Hz Stereo (2channels)
bitrate 128bps
I’m asking for help also in the Ubuntu Forum…
In my opinion we only need to fit the proper video settings and nothing else because I red that some winzoz users can convert videos for the Fuze also with Winavi not only MSC and some other people had used a different program whereof name I don’t remember!
