TEAC MP-288 video conversion (Linux)

stephen · #1 (**permalink**) 21st Dec 2007, 12:02 am

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

Tikker · #2 (**permalink**) 28th Dec 2007, 9:57 am

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?

stephen · #3 (**permalink**) 29th Dec 2007, 7:36 am

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

admin · #4 (**permalink**) 2nd Jan 2008, 10:29 am

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.