Dingoo A320 forum

How can I get videos to work with the Dingoo? I've converted to avi, mp4 (Ipod and PSP) and regular MPEG. Either the video says "unrecognisable format" or it pauses every few seconds.

An .avi file can be many things: DivX, Xvid, MPEG2, MPEG4 and so on.
I always use Xvid at low bitrates (500 -750 bps) to encode my movies and never had problems with that. Divx should work fine too, but it gets faster "laggy" at higher bitrates, from my experience.

A video file is actually a container. There are many type of containers, like .avi, .mov, .wma, .mkv, .flv and so on. Usually the container contains a video stream and an audio stream. Advanced containers can contain multiple audio streams and multiple subtitle tracks. Video and audio streams are encoded using various codecs, such as MP3, DivX, AC3, XviD, Ogg Vorbis and so on.

In order to play a file, any player has to understand the container format. Then it must be able to decode the video and the audio streams. In other words it has to understand the codecs.

The Dingoo understands a lot of container types and codecs. However, some video files have high bitrates, meaning that the stream is too big for the CPU to decode in real time. Thus, the codec gets very CPU intensive, even if the device understands it. Otherwise, the player will simply refuse to play files with high bitrates.

Someone was kind enough to do some tests by trying to play files with various (not "variable") bitrates. You can probably use the charts to get an idea about what codecs, containers and bitrates to use when encoding video files for the Dingoo for a smooth playback.

Video encoding is a nasty job. There are some good utilities you can use to encode and convert to your liking, the Swiss Army knife being the command-line ffmpeg. There are various, easier to use frontends for it, like SUPER.

Zugu: thanks for the tip on SUPER. I think another classic program to encode video's simple and fast is VirtualDub for Windows or Avidemux for Linux. Both very simple, stable and support a lot of formats.

Super is a crap freeware converter, i used that before i switched to Format Factory.

I always convert my videos (if they need converting) to mp4 320*240 MPEG4, or AVI 320*240 MPEG4, this has never failed me and has good picture and converts quickly regardless of size.

I'll probably give Format Factory a try, but I never heard of it. It's actually very, very hard to find a good freeware converter, even in the age of Google. Almost all quick and dirty video converters are commercial, and I found SUPER after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It's not perfect, but after some tinkering it works just fine, assuming one tries a lot of setting combinations for encoding. Once the right settings are found, it just works.

The encoding resolution is not the only setting to abide to. There's choice of encoder, container, video and audio codec, bitrate for both streams, aspect ratio, number of frames per second, and so on. SUPER is at least decent when dealing with all these.

VirtualDub is also useful for cropping, cutting, merging and basic video editing.

Pocket Divx Encoder is a great basic video encoder/editor that allows you to choose the device you wish to encode the video for via templates, But it does allow you do some tweaking via it`s interface once you have chosen the desired template, Plus it gives you a pretty good estimate of the resultant file-size before you click the encode button. Best of all, It`s small, Fast and free. But sadly only works on windows.

Trooper

Seems we all are using something different.
For me WinAVI MP4 Converter works like a charm and never had any lag playing a video on the Dingoo. Just converted Dance Flick and it ran flawlessly smooth.