I am a new uesr to the SanDisk Fuze and probably have a simple question. I downloaded a video podcast which has a file extension of .mp4 from our local PBS station. The problem is that even though Media Converter recognizes it when I select and go to convert it states that the file format may be incompatible or corrupt. It plays well on my PC so I know it is not corrupt. How do you convert these videos to play on the Fuze?
Try Video4Fuze instead.
Cut-and-paste this link:
http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=sansafuse&thread.id=31437
Agreed. I have had enough problems with Sansa Media Converter to avoid using it completly.
I am new to the sansa community here myself. My 8 yo daughter bought the Fuze becuase she wanted an mp3 player and well this one is supposed to play video. After a few hours i was able to use any video converter and SMC to transfer 2 movies onto the Fuze. But since then i had to do a hard drive recovery, thanks kids, and now that same way will not work. I get the video onto the fuze or the memory card and it will play for a short time and then freeze up. I have downloaded a number of different programs and tried them. Such as Video4Fuze, DVDfab, Anyvideoconverter and they all end up doing the same thing. Im not sure what to do. i am not what you would call computer savy. Any help would be appreciated. I have read through and tried different things that have been posted. I don’t know what i am doing wrong. Thanks all.
This is entirely a guess, but I have a hunch that when you did the hard drive recovery you lost codecs–which means coder-decoder, the formulas for converting videos. Try updating or reinstalling Windows Media Player, which probably has a bunch of shiny new codecs tucked inside its evil self, and then try video4fuze again.
As I said, it’s only a guess. If it doesn’t work, post on ssorgatem’s video4fuze thread to see what the real experts say.
video4fuze doesn’t require any codecs installed, so it shouldn’t be a codecs issue…
Let’s face it. The Fuze is an excellent audio player, but a horrible video player. Video is best avoided on the Fuze. I can’t think of any mp3 player under $100 though that is usable for video, and it is hard to find one under $170 that is good at video.
The conversion of the audio layer causes timing issues, no doubt. I haven’t played with video4fuze, as I want to play with WinFF a wee bit first. The latest conversion software I’ve been tinkering with has this engine for audio and video.
Video, as far as the image playback on the Fuze, is pretty darned good, especially considering the small screen. With the .28 build firmware, at least I have video resume and good indexing compared against the e200v2.
For proper conversion, I can’t overstate the importance of a codec pack like CCCP to give the SMC the tools it needs. CCCP, the Combined Community Codec Pack is an excellent group of tools, and it works very well- much better than the K-Lite group.
Bob :smileyvery-happy:
A few additions: WinFF is just a graphical frontend to ffmpeg. ffmpeg and mencoder (used by video4fuze) are the two leading open-source video conversion tools. When I started to find a way to convert videos for the fuze on Linux I used both of them. At this time - a few months ago - I found quite some instabilities in ffmpeg and issues in combination with other libraries (notably lame). In addition mencoder had a couple of options I missed in ffmpeg (e.g. for aspect ratio handling). Therefore I decided to stick with mencoder and that is why it is bundled within video4fuze now.
I know that ffmpeg is progressing pretty fast and might be on par nowadays.
Both mencoder and ffmpeg are using the same codecs. I wouldn’t expect any difference in this respect if they are compiled about the same codecs base. If you are installing on windows you might be bit more careful upon mixing different codec packs. I have no experience there but I have seen quite some complaints on this issue.
About video quality. I strongly support neutron_bob's saying about the extremly good video image quality on such a small display. Moreover I never had audio timing issues when converting videos my way - using mencoder and AVI-Mux GUI. That means audio quality and sync is excellent as well.
I have successfully used FormatFactory (free and everything!) to first convert mp4 (h.264) to avi then used SMC or video4fuze to convert it for the fuze…
