Anyone make this work? It seems to be fully supported, as a Sandisk V-Mate chart documents what settings to use for the Connect.
Video and audio are fine, except for an annoying clicking noise, which occurred on two different Connects, but not when played on a TV. The full problem description is in this post on the Sandisk V-Mate forum.
[UPDATE: Somehow, the clicking noise stopped. It may have been removal of files using the PC, where it said the micro SD card needed to be fixed. I tried, but couldn’t figure out how it got fixed on both Connects and both micro SD cards. Not worth a bump. Also putting update in last post, since searchers might look there first.]
Just for chucks, maybe you could tweak the audio settings and see if the clicking sound goes away? The Sansa Media Converter created a video file for my Connect that had the following different audio attributes:
Format : AAC
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Nominal bit rate : 48.0 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Thanks for MediaInfo and the diff from V-Mate’s audio settings.
Unfortunately, it’s not yet known how to make those changes, or whether it’s possible. The V-Mate supports changing recording settings via a few GUI choices or entering a 12-character alpha Recording Format Code. There’s a Sandisk chart of these codes to use for various playback devices, mostly cellphones, but also two Sandisk players, the View and Connect (for which it says “… select “Sansa View” in “Portable Audio / Video Players” or use Recording Format Code” ). The V-Mate forum has begun to deconstruct the codes, but so far have not found a code for anything audio, like format or kbps or sampling rate.
A Sandisk brand micro SD card also had the clicking noise (there is some problem on using a Kingston brand micro SD card in the Fuze, so I was hopeful and bought one last night).
I could always run the V-Mate-produced video files through Sansa Media Converter, but that takes all the ease out of it (pop out, pop in card).
Audacity wouldn’t accept the video file (I was hoping it was smart enough to pull out the audio only). I wanted to take a look at the noise.
The noise doesn’t occur during periods of silence. So I’m thinking the Connect might be struggling to decode this audio while also displaying video, and grunts out some electrical noise as it takes a breath. I think you’ve pointed me in the right direction: if possible, change some audio setting to something the Connect can handle more easily. Thanks.
Just to confirm that it IS the audio settings, could you change them using something like Any Video Converter? I know this isn’t something you’d want to do during normal usage, long-term.
Sorta maybe confirms. No noise, but who knows if the video conversion also contributed to removing noise. I used the free version of Any Video Converter and chose the following conversions:
Video:
video codec: mpeg4 (one of 3 V-Mate codecs)
video bitrate: 768 (was the default, don’t know what V-Mate’s was)
framerate: 15 (V-Mate allows 15 or 30)
Audio:
audio codec: aac
audio bitrate: 192
sample rate: 48000 Hz
I tried to convert using Super, because it has a video stream copy option, meaning it doesn’t alter the video. But I got an error and couldn’t debug what was causing it.
Could you try putting a song with the V-Mate’s audio attributes on your Connect, and see if it has the clicking sound? If so, that might confirm that the issue was with the audio attributes, and not the video’s.
Good thought, I was stuck on my initial theory of some sort of processing overload.
If we got noise, we would have found the culprit. However, no noise on an audio file converted to MP3, 64kbps, 1-channel, 16 kHz sampling rate. (The only odd value there was the 16 kHz sampling rate.)
I guess the V-Mate folks didn’t test with their own product, but simply went by specs.
I wish I knew of some other player on the market that can simply take an external card with video in the top folder (where the V-Mate puts it), and then play and resume the video properly. Not Creative Zen or X-Fi, not Sansa Fuze. Don’t think the View resumes. Maybe a Cowon? Or some PDA with TCPMP, though its battery life would be worse than the Connect’s. Boy, that Zing team of designers and developers was great, to make resume work so effortlessly.
I wish I knew of some other player on the market that can simply take an external card with video in the top folder (where the V-Mate puts it), and then play and resume the video properly.
Got excited about using my Rockboxed e200. Plugged in the card, but no go. Rockbox doesn’t support the V-Mate’s output formats.
From the Supported Formats of the Rockbox manual:
“Video .mpg, .mpeg,
.mpv, .m2v
Play the MPEG1/2 video”
The V-Mate supports mp4 (ISO), mp4 (PSP), 3g2, 3gp (the latter two are for cellphones).
But thanks for the ideas. Gonna try a Sony Clie PDA (the V-Mate can output to a Memory Stick). Or maybe I’ll bite the bullet and finally learn about all these video formats, and then RTFMs.
[UPDATE: Somehow, the clicking noise stopped. It may have been removal of files using the PC, where it said the micro SD card needed to be fixed. I tried, but couldn’t figure out how it got fixed on both Connects and both micro SD cards. Not worth a bump. Also putting update in first post.]
