MP5 Video Player

Due to a limited budget, I have to look for good tech deals on the cheap. I would love to get an iPod Touch, but they are up there in price and I can’t justify spending that much. Therefore, I purchased an MP5 video player off eBay with some extra holiday money. It came from Hong Kong and was supposed to be able to play a variety of different ‘web’ formats. For under $40 I decided I didn’t have much to lose.

The first unit I received was defective and couldn’t really play anything. The replacement player they sent is awesome. It is an 8GB unit (expandable to 12GB with SD card), can display 260K of color, has a screen resolution of 400×240 at 3”, and fits perfectly in my palm. While it does play a variety of video formats, you have to be very careful of what codecs the video uses as well as the bitrate.

I became educated very quickly on how these two items work together. Just to make things simple, I now run all my video through the viDrop (wickly awesome and free) conversion program and use a modified ‘Generic Rockchip 400×240 High’ preset configuration. It re-encodes the video at the proper resolution using the XVID codec, mirrors the video’s original FPS, and uses a bitrate of 600.

A good thing to remember when re-encoding for this player – always try to use original video with a higher resolution and higher bitrate than what your end product will have (it will look way better after conversion than going the other direction).

So far the video has ranged from very good to stunning. While I mostly use my player to watch Revision3 shows when I take walks at work, it also plays MP3 files, can display text, has a voice recorder, has a radio tuner, and can be used as a picture viewer.