Electronic – Christmas card with tiny screen

lcd

I've just received a Christmas card with a tiny lcd that played a movie when opened. Sweet! Obviously, my first impulse was – time to load my own video! I hooked it up via a tiny usb port I found and I managed to open the video on it – it was titled "SOMETHING-MPEGx17.avi". Now, I tried loading an avi and then an mp4 onto it – neither played correctly. Does anyone have an idea of what to try next? Is there some way to archive an mp4 into an avi or something?

Thanks!

PS: Not sure if this is the right stackexchange site for this… Is it?

Best Answer

An AVI file is just a container. Inside of it are multiple streams, each requiring their own codec to make sense of. For example, your AVI file could have an 8-bit h264 video stream and a MPEG layer 3 audio stream.

I hope you kept the original file! There are tools out there to show you what streams are in an AVI file (can't link without knowing your OS), so use one of these to figure out how the original file was encoded. Then (hopefully) you just need to encode your material in those formats and load it up (assuming it fits).