I didn’t know Western Digital got into the hardware media player market! Anyway thanks for the heads up (google helped too).
Note: If your player is
this one, there’s a new firmware update (1.01), so I’d grab it.
Truly impressive specifications (see the manuals on
this page).
Anyway, delving deeper in the manual reveals that for the MOV container, the only video codec supported is MPEG-4.
Unfortunately, Nikon CoolPix 5600 uses Photo-JPEG for video.
So yes, in your specific case, any conversion you do will have to be lossy (though you can adjust parameters to minimize that loss).
So what are your options?
- This is my personal favorite way of dealing with this. Get
MP4Cam2AVI (freeware and open-source), and convert the movie to Xvid in one click. The default setting is to have a lossless transcoding of both the audio and video streams from the MOV container to the AVI container, but you don’t want that. Under video format, pick one of the Xvid. Under audio format, pick either uncompressed (PCM) (may take quite a bit of space) or mp3. Your resulting AVI should play in the player. If not, perhaps your player doesn’t support the fourcc (four character code) XVID (the manual doesn’t state which fourcc’s used by MPEG-4 part 2 they support - but I tend to assume XVID is one of them). Use a fourcc changer and change it to DX50 or DIVX.
- If you go the QuickTime Pro route ($30 from Apple), click file, export. Pick Movie to QuickTime Movie for MOV, or Movie to MPEG-4 (for MP4), then click options.
For video, click settings and be sure to pick MPEG-4 (since it’s the only codec supported by the player in MOV and MP4 (at least according to the manual - if you’re adventurous, try H.264 with MP4 and see if that works)). You should leave top options to automatic (key frames and bitrate), set frame rate to current, depth to millions of colors, and set quality to high or better.
Then for sound, either linear PCM or AAC should work. Try to be consistent with what you get from your input though (Nikon 5600 produces 8-bit, mono, 8 KHz).
You probably won’t need internet streaming, so you can uncheck that.
I do have one qualm about using QuickTime Pro to encode to MPEG-4: quality. See this extremetech article:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1544898,00.asp
(
one of the screenshots: MPEG-4 = Apple MPEG-4 in this context)
Apple’s implemention of MPEG-4 is pretty awful.
One option you have if you’re still attached to the MOV container is to use 3ivx for your encoding. Download it
here. On the drop-down menu for codecs in QuickTime Pro you’ll have 3ivx. The thing is it encodes in the exact same fourcc as Apple MPEG-4 (mp4v), so it’s perfectly readable in any other computer with QuickTime (even without 3ivx installed), and the quality is much better. However the codec is a 30-day trial.
- You can convert to MPEG-1. Use TMPGEnc Free Edition in conjunction with the QuickTime plugin. TMPGEnc can be found here:
http://www.tmpgenc.net. The download button is well-hidden: after you pick your language, it’s at the
top of the page between 'about tmpgenc' and download). Then get the QuickTime Plugin from
here. Put that file into the same folder as where you extracted your TMPGEnc files. Open TMPGEnc. Skip the wizard. Drag and drop your movie onto the window (you may have to do it twice). Then click settings and adjust the settings to your liking (I recommend MPEG-1, Constant Quality (settings, quality=100, max bitrate=100,000), frame rate same as your original mov, Motion Search Precision of highest Quality; not sure about audio settings). Note the size has to have multiples of 16 (a restriction of the MPEG format). If your .mov is a weird resolution, just overshoot a little, and under the advanced tab, under video arrange method, pick center keep aspect ratio. When you’re done with your adjustments, go to the top and click start.
- If you want to convert it to wmv. You’d have to get QuickTime Alternative first. This will contain DirectShow filters to enable your MOV files to be read in Windows Media Player and other Windows apps. Then you can use
Windows Media Encoder 9 (more powerful) or Windows Movie Maker (for novices) to encode your video into wmv with video codec windows media video 9.
Random rant: I’m a bit surprised Western Digital omitted Motion JPEG/Photo JPEG as a supported codec. They got all the major containers (MPEG, AVI, MOV, MP4, WMV, MKV), and video codecs (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 2 (aka the DivX Xvid 3ivx etc...), H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10 aka AVC), and VC-1 (which includes Windows Media Video 9)), but they omitted Motion JPEG (AVI)/Photo JPEG (MOV), which is used by most digital cameras out there!
