Vidoe playback on the A3

[Starchild]

I'm probably buying the A3 in the next few ways, and I wanted to ask:
Will most videos play on the A3 without converting them?
How will a 640x272 AVI, file for example, will look on the A3?

[rcr0412]

it should play fine, its hd video there seems to be an issue with

[siilverrr]

Too anemic to handle 1280x720 H.264 files.

Struggled with 1280x720 MPEG-1 file rcr0412 asked me to test in another thread (couldn't keep the audio and video in sync).

960x528 XviD (1.2 SMP according to GSpot) plays fantastically. This had AC3 sound. Small (*really* small) black borders at top and bottom of screen when Aspect Ratio is set to "Auto"; borders disappear when set to "16:9" and picture is marginally stretched.

620x256 XviD (1.0.3) has large black borders at top and bottom on "Auto" and you would call this truly letterboxed. Picture detail looks good to my untrained eyes (plus there are 10 "Brightness Levels" you can set the LCD to depending on your preference).

When I set this to "16:9" the picture stretches to accommodate the whole screen. The jaggies become more pronounced - no doubt as a result of stretching the picture a great deal - but they were already present in high intensity scenes, due to the source encoding. A perfectionist would probably encode their video at a higher resolution, but I don't see the point in being fussy, personally, for a 4" screen.

MKV and OGM files both play, and allow me to switch between Japanese and English audio tracks, but for some reason it isn't possible to enable the embedded subtitle track. Happily, it's easy to extract the subtitles beforehand (takes a few seconds), and put them in a folder alongside the file before asking the A3 to play it. This might even be preferable, given that you can make them appear at double size, or stretched vertically, for example - the latter being the default due to the small size of the screen.

An XviD encoded with QPEL did not keep video and audio in sync. I re-encoded this with AutoGK to remove the QPEL and now the A3 plays it perfectly (kept it as XviD, looks the same and took around 30 mins on a P4 3.0GHz).

Cannot play H.264 HP files.

Plays a decrypted VOB file but this is not efficient in terms of space.

It freezes after about a minute during one particular 640x480 XviD (1.1.2 Final) file and I don't know why. Other 4:3 ratio files have played without problems.

I'm running firmware 1.14A and trying to be as objective as possible. Unfortunately I haven't got another PMP to compare the A3 to, so hopefully someone else can chip in with their comments.

For the record the screen is very sharp. On the highest brightness the LCD feels like it could burn my eyes (on the menu screen at least)!

I'm slightly disappointed that it didn't play everything I threw at it, but I guess that I'm just spoiled by my desktop pc.