MyMPx.org - How to.......Play a DVD on your MP4 Player

Well as this is the "Support and How to Section" I could not see many How Tos so I have decided to come up with one.

How to Convert a DVD to your player:

What you need:

Plenty of time
A DVD Drive
A reasonably fast computer (mine is 600mhz 256MB RAM)
Quite a bit of free space on your computer (5GB should be OK)
Software
Your MP4 Player

The software is available in the download section, you need:

DVD shrink
Pocket DivX encoder
MP3 Player Utilities 3.68

This is a four stage process, and will take some time, so bear with it.

Stage 1: Taking it off the DVD

Although PocketDivX will convert your VOB files to AVI (the video format you need), it will not do it straight from the DVD, because the lovely people who made the disk do not want you to be copying it. This is where DVD shrink comes in, because it basically decrypts and copys the files onto your hard disk so you can view it on that.

Download DVD shrink and open it

Insert your DVD into the drive and select "open disc" and choose your DVD.

goto Edit ---> preferences and find the box where it says "split files into 1GB file chunks", deselect it and press OK.

It is best to "Re-author" the DVD because you dont really want the menu's and extras and it will save space on your player, so click re-author. You will want to choose the "main part" or the longest time in the list, right click on it and select add. The bar at the top that is green will tell you the resulting size, it will range depending on the length of the film

click backup! and go through the tabs selecting what you need, you can skip the "deep analysis" by unticking the box, it will save time but the resulting file size may be bigger.

It should start encoding, this took me about 3 hours 30 minutes

you should end up with "AUDIO TS" and "VIDEO TS" folders on your PC

Stage 2: Converting the File

You now need Pocket DivX encoder, it doesnt really matter what device you choose but for the sake of it I chose "Smartphone". Go to the top right and click "open" inside the "file to encode" area. Choose your saved vob file (in the VIDEO TS folder), it should be the first one.

choose the output file and it doesnt matter if you change the quality settings, changing it higher will not matter as it will get encoded again and if you choose lower it will be faster but of less quality.

It is best to choose the dimensions for your player on the video, I am unsure of these but know the 1.5" players are 128x128, preview a short clip to make sure all is well, then click "encode now"

this took another 3 and a half hours for me

you should now have a resulting AVI file, playable in windows media player or winamp. If it isn't, you may need the codec pack on this site (check the downloads again)

Stage 3: converting it to your players format

now you need to install MP3 utilities, you may already have it, but it needs to be 3.68, mine came with 3.57 on the disk.

go to the "AMV video convert tool" and open it. Your input file should be the resulting AVI from pocket DivX, choose the output destination, and select the file in the box in the list under the play button....now click settings (the cog button)

(if you do not select it in the list box settings will be greyed out)

choose the screen width and height (mine was 128*128)

change the frames per second to high (I didnt do this first go and it jumped every 2 seconds), choose mode2 for focus image (not sure what these do?) then press OK and Begin

this took about 15 minutes for me

EDIT: At this point for one of my DVD's I got stripes over the screen, bit garbled, so I went back to pocket DivX encoder, opened the encoded file and "resynched" it, it worked fine.

Stage 4: Copying to your player

My suggestion is to make a "Video" folder in the root of your player, thats the box that comes up when you click the drive in "my computer". Put the resulting AMV in there and it should detect where it is.

Voila, a working DVD on your player :D

you can thank me by visiting my site on IMUP2DATE.CO.UK where I have videos that are playable on mobile phones and they can also be converted to these players.