My new Sony nwz-a816 Walkman mp3 video player (4 gb model) just arrived.

After charging and testing it a couple of hours, I ran into a problem, The mp3 player just would’nt play the videofiles I tested.  I got the “Wrong format” error message on my Walkman.

After a couple of minutes googling after forums describing similar problems, I noticed that the videofile had to be in a certain size (width*height in pixels) and a certain bitrate and frame rate. Also the mp3 player only plays .mp4 videofiles with the mpeg-4 codec.

So, I went looking for a propriate program to do the job, converting the files.  I tried 3 other programs before I tested SUPER.
This program did an excellent job, and was just what i needed. It’s also totally free to use.

To be able to playback videofiles on your Sony Walkman nwz-series heres what to do:

1. Download and install SUPER.
2. In SUPER, choose mp4 as “Output container” and mpeg-4 as “Output video codec” and AAC as ”Output audio codec”
3. In the “video scale size” choose 320:240 or less.
4. The fps (frames per second) of the new converted video, should be the same as it was on the old videofile,
   to figure out the fps of your videofile, drag and drop it onto the filelistbox in SUPER, and double click yourfile.
   A new window pops up, and  a little bit down, you see something like “Frame rate : 30.000 fps”.
   Close that window, and in “Frames/sec” you choose (in this case) 30.
5. Set the bitrate of the video and audio, to not more than 500 and 128 kbps.
6. Make sure your videofiles in the list, are checked to “Active”, and hit Encode.

That should do the trick, so now your videofiles should be playable.
I tested this on my nwz-a816, but it probably also work on the a815 and a818 and a couple of others.

Here’s a screenshot of the setup in SUPER:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Applications, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.