Hey guys,

Since I've heard rumblings that the video player on the GP2X isn't perfectly stable, can someone recommend one (to download from the file archive) that is?

Thanks.

Since upgrading to firmware 2.1 I can't remember ever having a problem watching videos with the regular player, and I would say I use my gp2x for video fairly often.

The only player I've tried from the archive is ffplay and that was back before frimware 2.0 when my movies were crashing and I wasn't satisfied with the included player, but you won't get watchable framerates with ffplay.

Ok, thanks mushaden!

The built-in player is fine. I only had it crash maybe once, and that was with an older firmware.

2.0.0 crashed once or twice on me. 2.1.0 had the irritating bug where sound would play through the speakers and the headphones occasionally. 2.1.1 has been perfect as far as I can tell

So I was thinking about picking a GP2X up and thought it was a pretty good portable video player until I read some posts. Is the player only able to play AVI's or can it play other file types? An example would be MKV's... I really want to buy one of these, but I think having to convert video for any player is bullshit... Someone made an excellent media player for the normal vanilla X-Box, why dont we have such a player for the GP? A media playing suite would be an amazing thing

No, it won't play MKV right now, it will play AVI and OGM with DivX/Xvid video.

With software like avidemux, you can convert a MKV to AVI without even transcoding, just copy the streams to the new format. This takes only a few seconds even for very long files.

Yeah, I messed around with avidemux and it's not fast enough. Any word on when this sexy linux enabled portable is gonna get a ported media suite?

The big problem there is the use of special decoding hardware in the GP2X. People have been able to tweak mplayer somewhat, but I don't think anyone has gotten other programs to use the hardware. Doing video decoding in software does not produce acceptable framerates.

Well, that explains a bit, thanks for the reply and giving me a chance to understand. Man it pisses me off, this system would be a dream if someone could get mplayer working.

I usaly encode my stuff with my little mencoder >send to gp2x script, never had a crash with self encoded videos so far (apart from low batterys but you cant blame the software for that).

Sticking hours of good videos/tv episodes on my sd card really made long train rides so much more enjoyable, and when i get bored with the videos i just fire up gngeo and have some great shump fun!

The only problem with that is when people start talking to you and want to know what that psp like thing is, really annoying :-)

Surely mpeg4 avi is a fairly compatible format, and if you have a GP2x, why would you use any other portable device for video on the go. Pocket encoder takes most formats too. I would just keep two versions of videos, one for pc full size, and one for gp2x/other qvga. Unless there are other internet things coming into account, in which case transcoding isn't that lossy.

It's certainly not deficient, ever tried getting video on a Nokia N70, or was it E70, anyway it was terribly finicky, and only did a max of 15fps at the end of the day. It would be handier though if it did support more formats, but not a functional requirement. I find the movie player quite stable, something funny though about channel switching on the audio - maybe I'm trying to encode 5.1 as stereo though or something stupid like that...


Not so often my end, I think most people just think it is a PSP. I wonder am I the only one in Ireland with one... Probably not.