[SOLVED] Old DVD player claims to be MPEG-4 compatible but it doesn't work

[Anston06]

I have an old Mustek DVD player that I'm messing around with because I'm bored. It has a label that says, "MPEG-4 Compatible". I connected a USB flash drive to see if it could play stuff from it. It played MP3 songs. I tried to play a video I downloaded from YouTube, but it didn't work. Since that didn't work, I tried to convert that video to a bunch of combinations of video and audio codecs using Premiere Pro.

I tried H.264, which from my understanding uses MPEG-4 (The original video might have already been H.264, but just in case it wasn't) with the AAC audio and MPEG audio settings and it didn't work. I tried selecting MPEG-4 instead of H.264 and using AAC audio (only audio option). That changed the extension to .3gp and I had to change it to .mp4 for the DVD player to even read the file. It of course didn't work. I tried the MPEG-2 DVD format with PCM audio and MPEG audio. Nothing works. When I try to play the file on the DVD player, it just says, "Unsupported Audio". I even tried some of these formats with the audio setting switched off to see if that would work and of course, it didn't.

Does anyone have an idea of how I could get the DVD player to play a video off of my flash drive? It would be really cool to do that. My guess as to why it doesn't work is maybe it uses a really early MPEG-4 codec or a special one or something, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

[BFG-9000]

MPEG-4 is just the container, which can hold any of 33 "Part" standard formats. For example H.264 AVC is MPEG-4 Part 10 which came out in 2003 but wasn't finalized to its current form until 2014. So if your player is older than 2003 you would not expect any H.264 file to play on it (not even MPEG-2 inside a MPEG-4 container), and if it's older than 2014 you'd expect only files formatted in a "Version" older than the player to work.

H.264 has had 27 versions so far, with the latest dated 2021. And this (along with ever changing copy protection standards) is why Blu-Ray players become worthless once updated firmware is no longer available. Which is very much unlike DVD players with their fixed in stone MPEG-1 or MPEG-2

Unfortunately, there have been quite a few players that can only play certain formats from the optical drive rather than the USB port

 

[Anston06]

MPEG-4 is just the container, which can hold any of 33 "Part" standard formats. For example H.264 AVC is MPEG-4 Part 10 which came out in 2003 but wasn't finalized to its current form until 2014. So if your player is older than 2003 you would not expect any H.264 file to play on it (not even MPEG-2 inside a MPEG-4 container), and if it's older than 2014 you'd expect only files formatted in a "Version" older than the player to work.

H.264 has had 27 versions so far, with the latest dated 2021. And this (along with ever changing copy protection standards) is why Blu-Ray players become worthless once updated firmware is no longer available. Which is very much unlike DVD players with their fixed in stone MPEG-1 or MPEG-2

Unfortunately, there have been quite a few players that can only play certain formats from the optical drive rather than the USB port

I see. So you're saying there is probably no way to play my videos from my flash drive?

 

[SkyNetRising]

I tried the MPEG-2 DVD format with PCM audio and MPEG audio. Nothing works. When I try to play the file on the DVD player, it just says, "Unsupported Audio".

Change audio to MP3 stereo instead.

 

[Anston06]

Change audio to MP3 stereo instead.

I think I already tried that. I don't think there's any way to get this to work because it's designed to play from a disc and not the USB drive like BFG-9000 said