I just encountered this same problem. It was even more frustrating because I had spent hours troubleshooting the right video format to get videos to play smoothly from an SD card. Why is the AVH-8400 able to send video from USB/SD back to rear monitors and not the AVICs? If Pioneer's top DVD receivers can do it (while also reading DivX files from USB/SD), you would think their "flagship" navigation units would share the capability....
Is there any way to mod or hack around this limitation?