Pandigital 7" photo frame won't play avi files

SOURCE: Pandigital 7" photo frame won't play video

It appears that the Pandigital 7" frame (7001W01) can only play back videos encoded with the Motion JPEG A codec. The instructions do not articulate this properly and only inform you to use .avi and that video from other sources other than your camera may not be supported. Problem is, not all cameras use MJPEG A to compress the footage. But this workflow will allow you to make any type of video playback on the frame.

Just to clarify - .AVI is not a video format. It's a wrapper that holds the video. The same goes for things like .MOV or .OGM. These are only wrappers. So for Pandigital to say the frame supports ".AVI" does not explain much. It does not support codecs like DiVX or H.264, for example.

At any rate - your best option to get video to play back on these frames is to download MPEGStreamclip from the developer Squared5 (it's free) and use it to convert your videos to Motion JPEG A avi's. I'm not sure about Fixya's linking policy, but you can easily search google for "MPEGstreamclip" and find Squared5's website.

MPEGstreamclip is available for both Mac and PC platforms.

1. Once you have the software, open it and go to FILE -> OPEN FILES and select the video you would like to encode. It will load in the viewer.

2. Next, go to FILE -> EXPORT TO AVI. This will open your compression options for an .AVI

3. The first option you are offered is "Compressor" - this is the most important. Click on the arrow and scan through until you find "Apple Motion JPEG A" Click it to select this as your compression codec.

4. Leave the quality setting at 50% I found that the Pandigital Frame will choke on larger files. We're going to be shooting for a file size of appx 300mb for 3-4mins of video in order to keep things moving. Video data is very large, and the fact is is that this frame is not meant to playback very data intensive files. So you will be best off playing it safe and keeping your bitrate (kbps) low.

5. If your video file has sound, leave your Sound setting at MP3 / Stereo / Auto, but drop the bitrate to 96kbps or 128kbps. Again, we're trying to keep file sizes down and the audio out of the Frame is not great to begin with. If you must have audio, keep it low (96kbps or 128kbps) If your file does not have sound, click the MP3 drop down menu and select "No Sound"

6. Choose your frame size. If your video is 16:9 (rectangle) select 854x480 (16:9) if it is 4:3 (square) select 640x480 (4:3) - Please note, if you are using 4:3 videos, your video will have black bars on both sides of the frame. This is the nature of video aspect ratios. Aside from magnifying your video to fit a 16:9 screen, you will need to have black bars.

7. Check the box "Deinterlace video"

8. Ignore the other options.

Click "Make AVI" and the video will begin to be compressed. As I mentioned, video is a very data intensive process and compression can take time depending on the length and size of the original video. I tested this on files that were 3 minutes and 3 GB to begin with on a MacBook Pro and got the file down to 300mb in 15 minutes using these settings. I repeated this on a PC running Windows XP and had the same experience. Your times and sizes will vary.

I do not recommend trying to playback files over 700mb on the frame. My first attempt gave me a 1GB file that froze the frame when it tried to playback.

In all likelihood you will need to put the video file on a SD card or use a USB thumbdrive as the internal memory of the frame is 128mb.

Good luck! And don't be afraid to try other settings in MPEGstreamclip to better render your videos for the frame. Video compression is all about trial and error :)