Playing MPEG4 Video
 

Has anyone had any luck encoding and playing a DVD with MPEG4 (or any other video format) with the DVD changer or the rear entertainment system?
Tried encoding MP4's using differnet compression settings but the disk is only recognized as CD and the files only play the audio with no video showing (both on the DVD changer and in the back)
The files all play fine on the PC directly from the DVD.

Regular DVD's play fine of coarse but I would like to be able to encode a bunch of kids videos on to a single DVD so I don't need to switch DVD's for the kids every time...

Any ideas?
Ronnie

No chance. The DVD player is just that. A standard DVD player that will only playback DVD Video disks which are actually encoded as Mpeg2 video, per the DVD spec. I'm pretty certain it supports both PAL and NTSC colour systems, but region coding is there, and dependent on where the car is sold.

The manual states:

-----------------------
The CD/DVD player can play the following media:
- Video DVD
- CD-DA (Audio CD)
- Cds/DVDs with compressed video/audi/image files

Supported Formats

Compressed video files
VCD
SVCD
MPEG1
MPEG2
MPEG4
-----------------------

There must be a way to make this work...

You are encoding MP4 as your output? DVD format is MPEG4, whereas MP4 is ipod, Xbox etc and is a container format FOR MPEG4. Computer software (windows/Linux etc) support MP4 but not your standalone DVD players.... assuming that is not the case, what program/s are you using to convert with? Settings?

Why is the source file MP4?

Cheers

J

Commercial DVDs are encoded in MPEG-2, not MPEG-4.

You're correct about containers though, the OP needs to find out what container format(s) and profile(s) are supported for MPEG-4 video and what bit rates, resolutions, etc. The information is likely on the Internet somewhere :)

My bad! Apologies. When i get my car in a couple of weeks, I'll try a few different mpeg4 codecs and bit rates/resolutions and see if i can get it to work.

I tried using several differnet encoding settings.
- iPod video format .m4v -> DVD shows as unsupported
- Used Videofab to create .mp4 with h264 for the video and aac for audio -> DVD shows up as CD and the sound plays
- other .mp4's downloaded off the net showed the same result

I tried looking it up on the web but apparantly no one has been doing this before...

Got it!
After much experimentation and many wated DVD+R's I finally managed to get an MPEG4 video to play.
The key is to encode the file as an AVI with an MPEG4 codec that is NOT H264.
I used Videofab with the setting for AVI file and MPEG4 at 640x480 (you can use the Zen or some of the other mobile device settings). Frame rate does not affect anything as far as I could tell (30 or 29.97 both work).

It's kind of sad that BMW does not document these things...

These are for the audio system with the 6-disc DVD player, not the rear entertainment system.

Actually, its the other way around. It says only the rear entertainment DVD player is capable of playing back compressed video files.

Maybe you could try Divx files. Its a long shot, or make sure the file has a .mp4 extension at least.

For a minute I was quite excited with the thought of putting lots of mp4 files in the DVD changer, but looks like thats not supported.