Hello,

I have tried a number of compression methods to convert my large collection of music vids to an sd card for playback in my f90bt with 2.0 firmware.

I'm finding that I always have a large number of files that will not play even though they play fine on any other device I test them on.

Also, I have a 16gb sd card and 16gb usb mem stick. Every time I turn the unit on I have to unplug and replug them in order for the unit to pick up on the files. This stinks... Originally my 2gig sd card didn't seem to have this problem, it would see and play shortly after turned on.

If I buy an 80gig ipod and connect it, will the unit simply pick up on it every time and give access or do you have to turn on the ipod, etc. It would be nice to just turn on the ignition, wait 20 secs.. then pick just start watching or listening.

Overall I am pleased with the unit, but sometimes it is too slow for response to input, etc. I sure hope Pioneer isn't thinking this 2.0 is the slick final update, it's far from being ready in my book.

Any help is appreciated. (and yes I have searched the forums for a few hours before asking. I didn' t find what I needed to know)

Bill

Have you tried DivX for video?

You should not have to turn iPod on every time you want to use it. System will turn it on and iPod has a sleep feature so it will turn itself off after a period of inactivity time.

Yes, I did try DIVX as a codec. Went back to xvit then finally went with a mpeg4 strain but not sure if it's divx. I finally found that xilisoft's converter ultra did the job and I used an mp4 codec with 512 bits, 640x480 and a "full" screen mode.. All my vids work now and they size up to full screen versus a letter boxed type of display. However, the unit is still very SLOW. Some functions take multiple presses on the icon to register and others register the command but take 30 seconds or longer to execute.

I really do like this unit but it is unacceptably slow.

I am going to spend some more time with the unit to get a feel for it, but I am likely going to contact Pioneer in Japan to let them know what is going on. I have read here that Pioneer USA believes the curent unit implemention is satisfactory and if you pull out all media the unit actually is pretty fast to commands, etc. If I were not using the SD and USB connections for data I probably would wonder also why folks complain about the speed. Maybe with an IPOD, there will be no speed issues but I have no way of knowing unless I buy one and I'm not so sure I'm willing to pay to see the result. Can anyone here confirm you can have 30 gigs of content on an IPod and not have the long delays in funciton with this unit?

For what it's worth, I have a 16gb sd card and 16 gb usb stick - both of which provide "jerky" video output but ok audio only performance. They are capable of video performance as neither have any glitches playing any kind of video file when plugged into my pc, the data speed is fine. But on the f90bt, they lag terribly and it's likely the f90bt - not the storage devices them self.

As soon as I know more I'll contact Pioneer in Japan and will let them know the issues some of us here are facing. What is so unbelievable to me is this stuff is made by Pioneer... I've been buying Pioneer since I was a kid - 30 years and longer ago... This F series isn't up to Pioneers engineering standards in my book.

Bill

After much trial and error I was able to find a format that would playback well on the AVIC from SD or USB. Attached are the settings I used. H.264 would play but not quite as well. Xvid was very jerky.

The best option I have found yet is to bite the bullet on an ipod that supports video. The ipod does the decoding and just outputs it to the screen on the AVIC. This has several advantages:

1. the AVIC performs as fast as normal since it is just a monitor

2. Anything that plays on the ipod/iphone will play on the AVIC

3. the ipod interface is WAY better than the AVIC video interface for SD or USB.

4. you can view the map while the video continues to play in the background. With SD or USB you have to pause the video to leave that screen.

Program wise, I like to use Cucusoft (with the attached settings) for SD or USB encoding. And I like to use Handbrake for encoding to the ipod/iphone.

does it play movies and tv shows purchased from the iTunes store?

i have searched and not found an answer to this.

does it play movies and tv shows purchased from the iTunes store?

 

i have searched and not found an answer to this.

I have never purchased anything from iTunes so I can't say for sure, but I would be very surprised if it didn't work.

does anyone know for sure? i purchase all my tv shows and movies via iTunes for playback on my Mac, iPhone and apple tv, but i'm just wondering if this unit does the playback as well.

Why would it not? Avic is simply getting the audio/video stream from the iPod so, like it was already mentioned above, whatever works on the iPod will work on Avic as well.

If you can, which you can, watch your iPod content on the TV then you should be able to do the same on the Avic. Same principle.

I did buy some 20 videos from itunes today, 11 out of the 20 work. I put them on a 2 gig sd card. I then tried to open up the nine that won't play on my f90bt on my laptop in realplayer and same thing real player will not open them up. but realplayer will play the 11 videos that my f90bt also played.

I did a test with one of itunes free music downloads first and it worked great so I thought I was good to go, but after buying 20 video's only 11 worked. I guess it is time to buy an ipod now.

Let me endorse for all here that the IPOD changes dramatically the performance of the f90bt and probably the 900bt as well.

I was in a love/hate relationship with my new F90bt and loved it for the concept but hated every minute of trying to use it with any video clips at all on either an sd card or a usb memory stick. At best, I could get semi smooth display action but at a cost of deep deep glitches in the housekeeping side of the 90bt running. It would glitch big time and make you wait up to a minute for it to get around to processing a command such as MENU or whatever. In the worst cases it would perform so poorly I'd just give up on turn off the volume and pretend it wasn't in my car.

The IPOD however changes completely your Audio/Video experience and the rest of the F90BT is free to function as intended. Pioneer has seriously flawed in either their design or their firmware as this unit has just enough CPU/FUNCTION to run the unit and it's internal features. From what I can see, it has not 1 cpu clock tick to spare for running the SD or USB ports with video data of any type. However, since on my F90BT and my IPOD classic 7th generation 120gb the task for handling the video and managing the fairly nice menuing system is handled by the IPOD, the F90BTreceives the video back through the AUX input video connection and this doesn't take CPU power to accomplish. So it handles A/V though the Ipod withou a glitch! It's a huge difference in your F90BT experience.

A word of caution however, the IPOD isn't excactly a "Play anything" proposition. I did spend quite a bit of time finding an encoder that would produce 100% compatible IPOD videos that would upload to the ipod. Itues has a conversion utility that will fix whatever you are trying to upload but it's slow and the files are not efficient in size compared to a NERO RECODE file for example. But at worst case you can just let the ITUNES fix the few incompatible recodes you might want to upload to the ipod video catalog.

Get an IPOD if you want the full A/V experience of the PIONEER F90BT. or limit your av sources to what you can fit on the internal DVD. However before spending days recoding whatever you plan to keep as your video library, test it first and avoid having to do it twice.

Bill

I added some videos to my 5th gen Ipod and have mixed results. I put a music video on it and it plays almost instantly with no problems. I put a movie trailer on it and it works well too. But then I put a movie on it using cucusoft and it has problems getting started. It goes to a black screen for 30-45 secs before it begins to play and it never removes the overlays. It has the AV symbol and clock in the left corner and has a bar across the bottom that same no title and no track or something like this. If I touch the screen, the ipod control comes up and touching HIDE clears that, but still leaves the clock and bottom bar. If I play the movie on the ipod alone it plays without any overlays and starts immediately. Also if I connect the ipod to a tv with a composite cable, it plays fine also. Any suggestions?

Update to the issues I posted about above. If you are playing the videos on your ipod, you can use itunes to change the property of the video file. You want to right click, click get info and uncheck the option to "remember position". This fixed the errors I was having of slow starts, overlays not disappearing, and no file name.

My Ipod does not show any video, but plays the sound, and some of my videos off of my SD card are very small like 2x2 inches any advice?

When my Iphone wouldn't show video but did play sound it turned out to be a defective cable. Check to make sure its not that (especially if things work properly through SD/USB).

Video size depends on what resolution you encoded your video at. Try the settings I give above.

Any luck figuring out why you have to re-plug in the usb every time you start the car? This is driving me crazy!!