Converting DVD to *.smv
 

I got my son an AVL AMP1620 mp3 player for Christmas and thought it would be fun to put some of his DVDs on it. (It is a Sigmatel-based *.smv player.) Many hours later I have a pretty descent method for doing it.

The first problem I ran into was that the video conversion software that comes with it is just like the software that comes with nearly every other smv converter. I needed a program to batch-convert files, so I looked all over and found that Trekstor.de worked a little harder on their iteration of Sigmatel's code. It's nearly the same but you can queue up a bunch of files at once and encode them all unattended with a click of a button. The program (i.Beat p!nk - SMV transcoder (Video2smv) can be found here. The resulting SMV files work great on my player but there are no advanced options other than high, medium and low video quality. If you really need advanced options, there are many other versions of this program out there, but no batch processing.

The second problem I had was that playback of large files (anything over 20 minutes) gets worse as time goes on. The audio gets out of sync and the video begins to stutter--especially if you've tried to fast-forward or rewind at any point. Easiest fix: Chop the movie up into smaller pieces. I tried a bunch of freeware and shareware MPEG Splitters an determined the Boilsoft AVI/MPEG/ASF/WMV Splitter was the fastest and most accurate program to use. It can divide a 1GB *.vob file (MPEG2) into any number of chunks (I chose three) in under two minutes. Beat that! After I batch converted all the files, I renamed them with successive names (vid01.smv, vid02.smv, vid03.smv, etc...) to ensure they played in order. Other than a slight click and millisecond pause in-between each clip every ten minutes or so, the flow was still better than the major sync problems I was having before.

If you are converting DVDs, you'll need to decrypt the *.vob files or rip the DVDs before you can do any of the steps above. There are many tutorials on how to do this at www.videohelp.com. I use SlySoft's anyDVD. It allows me to convert the files directly from the DVD by making them appear as already decrypted to other Windows applications. This saves the lengthy steps of manually decrypting and it saves and a bunch of hard drive space.

Hope this helps anyone else with an SMV player. Please post any tips or tricks you have figured out.