[transcode-users] Xvid's freaking out my portable A/V player

[Joe Emenaker <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay... this is a long-shot, but it doesn't hurt to ask....

I've got one of those 2.5" laptop hard-drive enclosures that, in 
addition to making it into an external drive, it also acts as a player 
for your mp3's, jpegs, xvids, mpeg4's, etc.

Here's a picture of the one I've got....
http://www.eatools.com/~luke/mediaplayer/GP-MED25-S-A.jpg

Anyway, the problem I'm having is that there are some videos which freak 
it out. I power up the unit (in its "player" mode) and it just hangs at 
"Scanning HDD...". If I take certain ones off of the drive (using as a 
USB drive still works, mind you), then the player will scan the files 
fine and then present me with the menu.

Through a lengthy process of moving various combinations of files onto 
and off of the drive, I can eventually figure out which ones are causing 
the problem. But then, I try to find something suspicious about the 
offending movies (odd fourcc, strange resolution, unusual bitrate, etc.) 
and nothing's really jumping out at me.

The insides of the unit are some circuitry to control the drive, and 
then a big ol' 1-inch-square chip that must control all of the decoding. 
Hopefully, this is some common chip that appears in a lot of devices... 
more chance that someone here might have come across the problem before.

Does anybody have any suggestions as to what properties of the videos I 
should be looking at? The unit hasn't complained about any .mpg's, yet. 
Just .avi's.... and it has accepted some xvid's and hung on others.

- Joe

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