jrfuda
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Posts posted by jrfuda
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I updated all the way up to 3.11 and don't notice any difference, yet.
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I'm able to get the scrolling wheel to work in SIRIUS (don't have XM), in HD AM/FM and in iPod (with shuffle turned off only) in my 110->120 updated unit. It does not work very well, though, as you have to become accustomed to hitiing it "just right" in order for the unit to differentiate between a selection and a "grab and drag/spin/scroll."
One thing that stinks is that station art and station ID are supported on XM and built-in analog AM/FM respectively, but not for SIRIUS and HD AM/FM, which means I only have "preset x" displayed for each preset.
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I just did my update along with both BT firmwares. Everything went fine.
So far I'm not impressed by the new interface's performance. I'm not sure if the touchscreen is up to the whole grab and spin motion. For the 10 minutes I played with it, 90% of the time it took my grabs for selects, and instead of letting me spin/scroll, it would select the item nearest to where I "grabbed" and slid my finger. The more I played with it, the better I got at touching/timing it just right to get it to spin/scroll instead of select, so maybe it's just an adjustment period. To be clear, I think the interface is great and very intuitive, I'm just not sure if the touchscreen is high enough quality to work as good as it should with the interface.
Time will tell as I use it more, perhaps the "just right touch" will become habitual and it will work perfect everytime.
I have not seen anyone mention this additional update... Just FYI. Maybe you can update the POI without the map update??I loaded that POI update exaclty per the directions onto the 16GB SD Card I always use with my Z110. When it restarted, it said there was a version incompatabilty or something... could be a bad copy of the file, and I will recopy and try again later.
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... mine has a tracking number but still no info on this item when I try to track it....
Same here, I have a tracking number but it's currrently not trackable... they probably packaged them all up with pre-issued numbers that bulk shippers use and they'll all be physically shipped out this afternoon, once UPS scans 'em they should be trackable.
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ckl5899, it might be a good idea to start a new thread with "cannot get rear seat audio to work with GMC Sierra" or something like that so that it'll attract the right folks who may be able to provide you the answer you need.
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If you're 100% sure you connected the head unit rear seat audio out to your OEM rear seat video system, then I'm at a loss.... I know some vehcile nead a special adapter of some sort to make the head unit audio compatable with OEM rear seat entertainment units (the video works without an adapter but not the audio). Hopefully someone else will chime in with a better answer.
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The audio for the rear screens will be output via RCA jacks to whatever you have in the back. In my case, it is sent to a wireless headphone system, so I can listed to one source over the vehicle speakers and the kids can listen to another via the headphones. You cannot make 2 diferent sources share the speakers (for example, iPod music on front speakers and DVD video audio on rear speakers will not work).
If you do not want to use heaphones for your backseat zone, you'll have to purchase a seperate amp, connect the RCA stereo outputs to it and connect the amp to some other speakers. This would make for a noisy/confusing environment becuase you'd have 2 different audio sources playing at similair volumes ojnly a few feet apart.
Now, if you pick the same source for the main and the rear screen (whether or not mirror av is active) then you can listen to what the rear screen is playing. I do this often when the kids are watching something that I enjoy, I'll have them put the headphones away and let them listen through the mains, and I'll tap the mode button to make sure it's on the navigation screen as - if I don't - I find my eyes wandering to the screen to often, it's VERY distracting (but useful when you have to navigate menus and such for the kids - thank goodness for the bypass hack). It's nice as I have a 10" sub under my seat and even though I'm not watching the movie, listening to the dialog and FEELING the effects of familiar movies is almost as good as watching it and a good way to safely stay entertained on long trips.
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Look on the SlySoft forum... I think folks that convert PAL to NTSC use a program called reclock to take care of the problem you're experiencing. I've never tried it myself, though.
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All my Audio is in synch using the methods I've used. I'm not familiar with the specific converter you're using; you'll probably get better answers on a support forum for it.
Is it in synch when you play them back on your PC?
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There are 3 places you can set the AR when using with an ipod.
In the ipod itself, you can set the video out and also set how to deal with widescreen vs 4:3 media. Not sure if either of these have anything to do with qwhat you see on your headunit screen, though. These settings are available on the ipod itself, not through the headunit.
In AV Settings, you can change among full (or is it wide?), normal, zoom and cinema. These effect the stretching on your screen. I've found the settings for these to be weird.
- For DVDs, widescreen DVDs in any AR exceeding 16:9, the setting should be full/wide, and 4:3 DVDs should be set to normal.
- For DivX via DVD, a setting to full/wide will work for all ARs, as long as your video is encoded correctly
- These various zoom settings, if I remember correctly, also interact with the aspect ratio setting for the ipod.
Remember, these are all in "AV Settings" and not via the little "gears" setting icon available when you're actually viewing ipod/DVD/Divx video.
Now, for the video AR settings that are available via the "gears" setting icon when video is playing, I think this is the "TV" setting, which is for the rear screens only. I leave this alone and use the AR button on my headrest monitors to toggle between 4:3 and 16:9 (not necessary for DivX, but necessary for DVD and iPod video).
Bottom line, I think if you leave the ipd video settings alone and change the AR/zoom setting via the AV Settings menu, you should be good to go.
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Did you replace the entire cable when you replaced the camera? If not, there could be a partial short in the cable, enough to momentarily/randomly change the resistence of the line, but not a totally break in the line that would cause 100% of the picture to go away.
You could try connecting some other video source directly to the head unit, using the camera input, and see if it does the same thing. If it does, then the problem is with the head unit (or maybe a little short/break in the wiring harness), if not, then the problem's in your connection.
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is there a way to force the headunit to run in night mode even when the headlights are off? I prefer the map to have the dark background
I'm not sure, but try putting the day/night display icon in your quick access list, then you should be able to toggle between the two from the map screen by pushing the icon... I'm not certain of this, though - it may just toggle the mode between day and automatic.
If that's the case, then VBLUE42's suggestion will work in conjuction with mine - the power line will force "night" mode, but the icon will give you an easy access override when you change your mind.
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When I put an SD card just with AVIC feeds info, the SD icon is dimmed, but I can still access AVIC Feeds, save gas info, etc.
How are you able to browse AVIC FEEDS POI's if the AVIC FEEDS app icon on the unit is greyed out.
AVIC Feeds and SD are two different Icons. The AVIC Feeds Icon is available in the "Destination" menu and a few others (via the favorites menu is one). The SD Card icon (where it appears as a picture of an SD Card and not as an AVIC Feeds Icon) is only available via the Sources menu. If you have an SD card inserted without any compatable media in it, it will not appear as a selectable source in the sources menu, or when scrolling through the sources. It will, however, still be available via the AVIC Feeds Icon (perhaps only if you have an AVIC Feeds file saved to it), importing settings (again, if you saved them on the card with AVIC Feeds) and for exporting driving records and gas data to the SD card.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.. I should have more clearly deliniated between SD Icon and AVIC Feeds Icon to begin with.
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Does the USB drive have any compatable audio or video files one it? Is it formatted FAT or FAT32? If not, it will probably not appear as a source unless critera are met (at least that's how it is for SD).
When I put an SD card just with AVIC feeds info, the SD icon is dimmed, but I can still access AVIC Feeds, save gas info, etc. If I insert the same card with at least one compatable audio or video file on it, then the SD card appears as a source. So I assume the same's true for USB.
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I can get videos to play thru the SD card, but for some reason my voice and video get out of sync. Are there any settings you can change to make them play better?
Did you confirm that they play in synch via your PC? What are the audio and video bitrates of the videos?
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I've gotten .avi encoded as divx/xvid to play at 768kbps through the SD card without problem. I, personally, don't like using the SD card, thouhg, becuase it only lets you show the video on the main screen, not the rear screens (if installed).
Interestingly, and I've pointed it out is a sticked thread about divx, divx and mpg4 in an avi container are the same thing. As long as your file has a .avi extenstion and is mpeg4 (essentially generic divx/xvid), it will play via both the disc drive and SD card. disc drive, of course, is limited to 720x480 resoultion and the SD card has some serious bandwidht limitations (I'm sure I'm pushing it with the 768kbps video I tried). DVD's have an average bitrate around 5Mbps, so an avi played via disc has plenty of bitrate headroom.
There's a lot more detail regarding my expirimentation here:
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Encoded some 4:3 material today (kids' cartoons). You can save a little space by realizing that 4:3 video has 75% of the pixels of 16:9 video, therefore, you can reduce the VIDEO bitrate by 75% and get the same quality level.
So,
- For a 16:9 video, you'd encode, using the profile above, at 720 x 404 at 1412/128
- For a 4:3 video you'd select 540 x 404 at 1059/128
Note: No change is audio bitrate, 128 is the recommended minimum (Though, for audio I'll be listening through the ipod or my Squeezbox systems at home, I always choose 320kbps). If I were encoding these to use in a home theater system with someting like a Networked Media Tank or other net video player, I'd go with a higher bitrate (though, then we start looking at creating diferent version that maintains AC3 audio for surround, and we're now beyond what a lot of these programs can do).
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After lots of tweaking and evaluation, I've arrived at the following CloneDVD Mobile profile, it can be pasted into the Devices.ini file:
[AVIC-Z110BT (DivX)] Manufacturer=Pioneer Res1=320x240 Res2=480x360 Res3=640x480 Res4=540x404 ResAna1=320x180 ResAna2=480x270 ResAna3=640x360 ResAna4=720x404 AllowNativeTVResolution=0 VTag=DX50 mopts=-lameopts cbr:br=%abrate% lavcopts=vcodec=mpeg4 moac=mp3lame Format=avi -noodml FileType=avi ARate=48000 ABRate=128 MVolume=10 Quality=23 useMencoder=1 SubTitle=0 MaxVBitrate=1412
This is as close a CloneDVD can get to the actual Divx Home Theater Profile. I highly recommend you perform at least a 2 pass encode to get decent quality (3 pass is better). Each additional pass adds about 75% more time to the encoding process, so, if it takes 60 minute to encode your video in single pass, it will take 105 minutes to do 2 passes and 150 minutes to do 3 passes.
I've found that using the full DivX Home Theater Profile spec for bitrate actual makes a noticeable difference in scenes with lots of motion (despite what I said earlier about keeping in the 1100's). The 1412 video and 128 audio for a combined bitrate of 1540 looks really good, approaching DVD quality. Again, I use the 720 x 404 resolution istead of the spec's 720 x 480 becuase some devices (like the Z110BT) don't handle the pixel-for-pixel aspect ration sources properly. Hard coding the AR into the resolution will save you some headache, at the price of a loss of horizontal detail (again, not a big deal on all mobile monitors, and probably not a big deal until you start getting above 40" for home video).
During my expirmentation, I used the commercial DivX Pro convertor with the mpeg2 plugin (allows it to convert mpeg2 files) and had a few issues like random gray frames added to the video, repeated audio and video frames (almost like they'd loop for a couple of seconds) and the inability to play the completed video file to the end. This varied based on the level of copy protection the source material had. It is a shame, though, becuase the parts of the videos that DID play, were indistinguishable from the DVD version, whatever algorithms DivX uses to analyze and encode video must be awesome. An interesting thing is that it took the DivX Pro Converter about as long to convert a video as did CloneDVD Mobile to do a 3-pass encode, which leads me to beleive DivX is performaing at least a 3 pas encode.
Another downside of the DivX Pro converter is that it does not let you crop any of the video if you want. I'm a big advocate of original aspect ration viewing for home theater, but for mobile video, anything wider than 16:9/1.78:1 is too small horizontally to enjoy on small screens. Programs that allow you to perform a "cinemascope zoom/crop," let you maximize the bitrate you're using to fill every pixel of your screen with acutal video and not black bars. For 4:3, however, I leave it as 4:3 becuase I don't like "fat" video (from stretching) or "headless/footless" video (from zoom/crop). Basically, any converting tool that uses mencoder, should give you the option to crop/zoom.
Don't forget, in order to backup your commercial videos to any format using any software, you need something to overcome the copy protection, I don't think I mentioned that. I, personally, use AnyDVD, but there are a lot of free options available out there as well.
I hope these little guides are helpful.
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That is too funny, I just logged in to post the exact same thing! It through me for a loop when it happened yesterday, until I realized that FM must be the abbreivation for "Federated States of Micronesia."
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PLease see the original post for corrected info...
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See instructions in this post: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=30426#p206066
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Night mode is only controlled by the illumination wire (or manually), and does not care about the time of day or amount of ambient light, so if you turn your lights on during the day becuase it's raining, the map will be dispalyed in night mode if automatic is enabled. You can create a shortcut on the map view to toggle day/night if you want.
The video settings (brightness, contrast, color, dim level) of each source type (see below) is also linked to the day and night modes. You can use these to tweak how bright things look (for example, if the map is still too bright for you in night mode, you can tone it done a bit). From pages 158-159 of the manual:
Operating the picture adjustmentCAUTION: For safety reasons, you cannot use some of these navigation functions while your vehicle is in motion. To enable these functions, you must stop in a safe place and apply the parking brake. Refer to “Important Information for the user” (a separate manual).
You can adjust the picture for each source and rear view camera.
1.
- Press and hold the MODE button.
- Press and hold to display the “Picture Adjustment” screen.
- Brightness — Adjusts the black intensity
- Contrast — Adjusts the contrast
- Color — Adjusts the color saturation
- Color Temp — Adjusts the tone of color (red is emphasized or green is emphasized)
- Dimmer -Adjusts the brightness of display
- [Camera] Shows the picture adjustment display for the rear view camera Touching [source] while adjusting the rear view camera image returns you to the previous screen.
- The adjustments of Brightness and Contrast are stored separately when your vehicle’s headlights are off (daytime) and when your vehicle’s headlights are on (nighttime). These are switched automatically depending on the vehicle’s headlights are on or off.
- The adjustments of Dimmer is stored separately when your vehicle’s headlights are off (daytime) and when your vehicle’s headlights are on (nighttime). Dimmer is switched automatically only when the value of nighttime is lower than the value of daytime.
- You cannot adjust Color for the source without a video and navigation map display.
- The setting contents can be memorized separately for the following screen and the “Video image”.
- AM/FM/CD/ROM/iPod(Music)/SD(audio)/USB(audio)/Bluetooth Audio/XM/SIRIUS/Digital Radio screen
- AV1 and iPod(Video)
- DVD-V, DVD-VR, DivX
- SD(Video) and USB(Video)
- AV2 and EXT1, EXT2
- Rear view camera image
- Map screen
- The picture adjustment may not be available with some rear view cameras.
- Because of the LCD screen characteristics, you may not be able to adjust the screen at low temperatures.
2. Touch [+] or [–] to adjust the desired item. Each time you touch [+] or [–] increases or decreases the level of the desired item.
3. Touch to return to the previous screen.
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Note: There are some changes in the numbers below since I posted earlier, I was posting from memory, and got some of the resolutions wrong.
Updated as of 01/21/2010
Updated as of 01/22/2010 See post 3 for more details
BLUF = ClonedDVD Mobile Generic divx format works on both SD and DVD-based DivX, with bitrate limitations for SD.
After installing my Z110BT this weekend, I started some experimentation on compatible video formats. I focused in on the mpg4 video w/mp3 audio formats because they appeared to be the same standard.
I encoded some of my kids' shows into a generic divx format with CloneDVD Mobile at 768kbps and 480 x 360. The software output these files with a FourCC identifying it a Xvid (FourCC = DIVX/DIVX). I then confirmed that these would play via the SD drive without any issues. I also tried a video at 1280 kbps and 852 x 480; this gave a bitrate error when I tried to play it via SD.
Next, I wanted to test the same files to see if they'd play as DivX via the DVD drive. to be on the safe side, I changed the FourCC to DIVX/DX50, which is correct for the commercial DivX 5.0 codec. It only takes a second to change the FourCC to whatever you want using ABCavi, as no recoding is required (though, the wrong FourCC could make the video unplayable).
After confirming that playback worked on my PC with the changed FourCC, I burned them to DVD and checked them in the Z110BT. It was recognized as DivX and worked flawlessly. Quality was better, because, in Disc mode, the aspect ratio was correct (4:3 displayed without stretching on both main and rear monitors, as did 16:9. 2.35:1, etc). In SD mode, 4:3 video was stretched to fill the screens, which was rather irritating.
Now, knowing that these files worked, I tried some video files I had encoded with CloneDVD Mobile some time ago at ~1400kbps and 720x400 for an old Archos video player (that I no longer have, left under a seat on a plane over 2 years ago). These files have a FourCC that identifies them as Xvid (I think it’s virtually the same profile as generic divx), so I really did not think they would work. They were already burned onto DVD (I have several dozen of these DVDs, with 3-5 movies on each of them), so I had nothing to lose. They worked perfectly, and looked as good as a DVD on the small screens (7” for Z110BT and 8.8” for the rear monitors).
Now I have nearly 100 movies/TV shows that can be viewed on the rear monitors in my car (since SD will cannot be viewed on the rear monitors, and looks bad anyway). Among all of these movies there’s at least 2 dozen kid-friendly shows, so I’ve got plenty of road trip entertainment ready for the kids.
Now, using CloneDVD Mobile does not let you have all the full bells and whistles that using the commercial DivX converter does (multiple audio, chapters, subtitles, etc.) but, do you really need that stuff in your car? I’m sure that any of the “convert from DVD” programs that come with Roxio or Nero (and other freebies) can create the same files, so you don’t need to buy anything else, just make sure the target profile is generic DivX. I think the bitrate does not matter, as long as you stay below the bitrate limitation of the physical DVD drive (10.8 Mbps?) and any horizontal resolution beyond 480 is a waste of bits, since the native resolution of the Z110BT is 800 x 480, and nearly all rear monitors are even less (and they’re composite video, so it’s not like you’re going to squeeze any more performance out). When they start making true HD-compatible mobile equipment with hdmi connections, then it might be time to start upping the bitrates and resolutions!
Note: if you try to play any DivX file that exceeds teh 720x480 max resolution for DivX Home Theater Certified Profile, it will not play, the Z110BT will display a warning "Cannot play HD content." This is a correction to what I posted earlier, which said I played 852x480, as I was mistaken. I apologize if anyone wasted time with the previous settings. I'll continue to post more info as I try other settings.
Update 01/21/2010: After some more experimentation, I have settled on a resolution of 720 x 404 at a bitrate of 1412kbps mpg4 video and 128kbps mp3 audio for a total bitrate of 1540kbps. There's not much gain in quality beyond these bitrates for the small screens we're using, the video even looks decent on my laptop, expanded to 1280 x 800 on a 14" display. If you plan on doing more with the video, like using it on a home video server for display on a HDTV, then you can crank the bitrate up a bit (or just make 2 version, one hires for home, and one following this guide for mobile, then another for iPod, etc., etc...). I don't recommend using the DivX Home Theater profile resolution of 720 x 480, though, because this is not true 16:9 and will have black bars on the sides on the Z110BT, and everything will be a little "skinny" on the screen. I'm assuming video coded with the actual commercial Divx Codec may have some sort of tag in it that forces the non-16:9 resolution to be forced to 16:9, but using this generic profile, it's a no-go.
Some of you may wonder, why not just encode everything for iPod? I'd rather not tie up the iPod to p;ay backseat video, and rather use its flexible music playback capability (much better than disc or SD-based music playback) I think video playback via DVD/DivX is as good or better (better when it comes to Aspect Ration handling) than the iPod, so this provides the best of both worlds
My next experiment will be using some of the DVD Ripping tools in Roxio with the commercial DivX codes to see what I can produce.
Z110BT > Z120BT UPGRADE IS OUT!
in General
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I'm pretty sure SD video will not play on rear monitors. Only DVD/Divx, iPod and AV2 will play on the rear monitors.
Just burn your videos to a DVD, they will work, and DVD can handle a higher bandwidth, so you can play higher quality videos. There are a handful of threads that address what can and cannot be played in the rear seats, and the limitations of the various codecs and source (DVD vs iPod vs SD).