TEAC MP-288 video conversion (Linux)
 

I recently got a TEAC MP-288 which is supposed to show MP4 videos.

In fact, it only seems to accept MTV videos (the pre-installed one starts with the string "ALIAVI"), and the supplied software requires Windows.

Is there a description of the file format (so I can hack my own tools), or can I use some utilities already existing? (anything open source for Win, MacOS, Linux?)

I'm looking for conversion to, and viewing of, the internal video format.

Is it really MTV? Do I really have to stick with that?

BTW, judging from the manuals, this player seems to be more or less identical to MSI's P500 (FM radio, menu button, etc.), I guess it's OEMed by someone else...

Any suggestions are appreciated!

S

There are two "MTV" video formats in the wild:

MTV invented by Actions Semiconductors but later dropped by in favour of AMV

And ALi-made version of MTV (actually they simply used orphaned name)
ALi-MTV which is used by Teac MP-288 (M566x chipset with 8051 Intel processor) is actually similar to AMV and SMV formats, i.e. being another proprietary flavour of MJPEG compression.

Unfortunately I have not seen any utility for batch conversion of videos to this format, but I've heared AMV format is widely discussed in forums. May be somebody there can help?

For AMV there's a GoogleCode project (amv-codec-tools, with integration into ffmpeg)

stephen,

The MTV video format is a much older video format for the Actions based players. It was later replaced with the AMV video format which had better compression (as .MTV video files didn't have compression).

I haven't seen any alternative MTV Video Converter than the one that comes with the MP3 Player Utilities (you will need a much older version of the MP3 Player Utilities as well ver 3.57 from memory). So far, the MP3 Player Utilities only comes in a Windows format, so to get it to run on Linux, you might have to look at getting a Windows emulator on it. That has been the alternative I know of so far. If there is anything else, please let me know.