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VIDEO – Creating MPEG-4 Video Files with your Computer
VIDEO – Creating MPEG-4 Video Files with your Computer
How to create an MPEG-4 video fi le
Video fi les that come from your digital camcorder, sent to you via e-mail, or which are freely available on the
Internet are encoded in many different ways. If not already in the proper MPEG-4 Simple Profi le or WMV9 Simple
Profi le format, a transformation operation must be done in order that these video fi les can be played by the
AV 700. This transformation process is called re-encoding.
There are basically two ways to do this; 1) Use the Synchronize button in Windows Media
®
Player 10 or 2) Use
the PC tools which are available on the AV 700’s hard drive. The fi rst method is very simple and merely requires
that you synchronize a video fi le in your Media Player library to your AV 700. You do not have much control in
this converting process though and Windows Media
®
Player determines which video types it will and will not re-
encode. The second method, though it requires some learning, will allow you to have much more control over the
fi nal quality of the re-encoded (converted) video fi le. It is described below. There are other tools available on the
Internet, some free and some for sale, that can also convert your video fi les into the appropriate MPEG-4 video
fi le format for the AV 700. See the web site www.mpegmobile.com for a list of a few of them.
PC Tools
The AV 700 is delivered with two Windows
®
based programs that allow you to create MPEG-4 Simple Profi le .AVI
video fi les. They are the MPEG-4 Translator and Virtual Dub
™
. The MPEG-4 Translator will call the Virtual Dub
program and give it the correct parameters to encode your video from its original format, .avi or .mpg (mpeg 1),
and then encode it into an MPEG-4 SP .AVI fi le. The fi le will be scaled in order to be played back properly.
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9.1 Installing the PC Software
9.1 Installing the PC Software
If your video fi le is not an MPEG-4 Simple Profi le .avi fi le of the proper size, you will need to re-encode it using
the following utilities. For the AV 700, you will need to create an AVI fi le that is MPEG-4 Simple Profi le with a
resolution up to 720 x 576 (depending on frame rate) and a sound track that is stereo MP3 or WAV. In actuality,
in all cases, a resolution beyond 640x480 does not add any advantage.
MPEG-4 codec (Compression/Decompression)
In order for MPEG-4-Translator to compress the video in a fi le of the format MPEG-4 SP that the AV 700 can
read, it requires an MPEG-4 codec to be installed on your computer.If you do not have the approporiate codec
installed, MPEG-4 Translator will tell you on start up which codec it requires. You will be able to download it for
free from the Internet.
Virtual Dub
™
A utility for transcoding one video fi le into another. This is a general purpose transfer and cleanup utility which
has many options allowing for even the most diffi cult video translations. When you install it with the ARCHOS
™
Installation Utility, it will automatically unzip. It will prompt you to save it to C:\Program Files\VirtualDub. You
should use this default directory location. Otherwise you will have to instruct the MPEG-4 Translator program
where to fi nd it. For more information on Virtual Dub
™
see the website - http://www.virtualdub.org.
MPEG-4 Translator
This program, developed by Archos, is a “Front-end” for the Virtual Dub program. It has a simple interface which
you use and it then tells Virtual Dub how to process the video fi le. It sets all the parameters for Virtual Dub
specifi cally to create a video fi le in the right size and format to be read by the AV 700. When you run it for the fi rst
time, the MPEG-4 Translator will need to locate the Virtual Dub program. If you did not install Virtual Dub in the
default location, you will have to show the program where Virtual Dub is. If you forget, Windows
®
will give you an
error when you try to launch it.