Hi All,

New member & first posting!

I am a proud owner of a heavily discounted F500BT unit that I'm just about to install in my Celica!

I'm looking for a really fast, smooth UI experience for music & movies to load up on my F500BT.

I was wondering what the general consensus here is on what would be best for this :a USB key, SD card or iPod?

Using an ipod involves me purchasing the unit and the expensive cable. SD cards or USB keys would be cheaper...

Also, what would be the highest capacity SD card or usb key to use with this device?

Thanks!

ipod..

you really don't want to use anything else, the navigation and issues with any mass storage device rule them out, since they're all a PITA.

Thanks for your reply Dianebrat so I guess I'm going to have to go with an iTouch and the Pioneer cable then...

I don't own an i anything, so I use an 8GB SD card in my F90BT. It works fine, but it seems that the movies need to be converted to the proper resolution or else the pictures get choppy. I would imagine that w/ this stereo being basically a miniature Windows machine that it'd just figure it out, but apparently that's not the case. I've also had an issue where a movie would play fine but wouldn't have the proper coded for sound to play as well. Right now I'm searching around on what is the best way to place movies onto the SD card (folders, leave it on the root, etc) to make things work more efficiently since it doesn't even show names of the movies of anything as I scroll through the list.

I wish there was a single thread to basically give my F90BT all the must current and up-to-date options, but these forums can be a little confusing sometimes. I don't even know the differences of models between an F700BT, F90BT, if the OS' can be upgraded from one stereo and made to work on another, CPU clockers to make it run faster, etc. As cool as this stereo is, it seems very slow to button inputs...my Android phone is faster. So much learning for me to do.

personnaly i use iphone 3G, for one simple reason ( i think )

if you want to watch a video only the iphone work for sending video signal...i mean the avic does just receive the picture, so the avic system don't need to "work" more than working with an sd card or other...( there's no problem of movie watching with buffer etc...that's what i think, correct me if i'm wrong ? )

i would find another better alternative but it's the best "plug and play" device...i know

To me the best video playback for quickest load up and best resolution is the DVIX files you can burn on to a DVD-R. If you use DVIX PRO 7 it does all the converting and burning for you. I fit over 40 movies on one disc and there was still room left out of 4.7 Gb. I have tried using the USB and SD card but getting the right resolution is tricky, with the DVD it seems to play widescreen all the time, but it also depends on your original file's resolution.

but the quality of divx pro converter is bad even if i put it in 1080HD format, you see alot of pixels

I don't know what to tell you then, cause all my videos I did looked as good as the originals that I downloaded. You can shine a piece of poop, but it is still a piece of poop. I don't know where you got your videos. I have seen some crappy videos that are downloaded at crappy quality. You can't increase it's quality, same with music. You can't take a 128bps file and turn it into a 320 bps file and expect it to sound good or look good.

Does anyone know if the F700's will play divx? is that the same as mp4?

I have a video convert application and so far have not figured out the correct settings to get good playback. I have a movie I converted with 1024bit rate and it had a decent picture but it was too much for the F700's CPU to keep up with so I lowered it to like 256 and then the pic quality was crap. Does anyone know when converting a movie what settings work out best?

B.

The manual will tell you if is DIVX, and no that is not the same as mp4. Mp4 is ipod video, which is good on the ipod video as far as format and resolution. I believe the ipod resolution is around 640 X 380. It has been quite a while since I did the converting for my deck. Getting ready to get back into it, soon as I get more storage space on my computer.

The manual will tell you if is DIVX, and no that is not the same as mp4. Mp4 is ipod video, which is good on the ipod video as far as format and resolution. I believe the ipod resolution is around 640 X 380. It has been quite a while since I did the converting for my deck. Getting ready to get back into it, soon as I get more storage space on my computer.

From the Manual : AVIC-F700BT and AVIC-F7010BT cannot play divX files.

Well, good luck then. DIVX movies are easy to me. Finding the right format, like I said before, also involves the original file. You can't take small, bad video and make it better by increasing resolution, that would probably make it worse too.

I found in the manual the specs on the Mp4 movies.

640x480

480mbits

I'm going to convert one of my xvids to those specs and see how it looks and plays on the F700

How'd it turn out?

Any updates Dyson? I've converted a ton of fullsize movies for my Palm Treo, so other than time, it's not hard to do it for the AVIC as well.