I was given this mp3 player and would like to have it working.
Is there a way to use it with linux [opensuse 11.0]
Of course the company says nothing about linux support in its owner’s manual, but it does say not to plug it in until I have the software installed. What do I need to get this working. Help please.
We need more to go on than mp3 player.
Just plug it in, what happens?
caf4926
it is a Philips SA3125 2GB Flash audio video player. I understand that I can “just plug it in”, but if it says not to plug it in until the software is installed, isn’t there a possibility that I will ruin the player? If not, I will certainly try it. However, don’t I need some type of software or driver [even in linux] to make it work? I believe it charges itself thru being plugged in at the usb port.
Thanks
Anything is possible. But it’s probably just a glorified PenDrive and will respond in a similar way.
well apparently the “IMPORTANT - Install software first” doesn’t have any meaning that I can figure out. I plugged player in and openSuse recognized it and showed it as a Philips with 1.9 GB on a vfat filesystem . I am currently waiting for the player to charge battery from USB connection. However I will need a converter to convert from mp3 to wma [for music] and one to convert video’s to whatever type it plays. I will have to check the philips website and google. There are firmware upgrades available, I wonder how I can do these? anyway, these ?'s are all up in the air until the player charges. I gues we can consider this post closed and solved for the time being.
Thanks caf 4926, for your help.
You said it was an mp3 player. Why convert to wma !
EDIT: Sorry. No you didn’t my Bad!
Are you wanting to convert using Linux? I can’t recal any apps that rip to .wma
In windows the best as I recal is : mmconvert
Just google it
No not your bad, I thot it was necessary to convert, but apparently not. I think it plays both .wma and .mp3. It plays .mp3 anyway which is all I need.
Video conversion is another story, which I will find out about.
Thanks again caf4926
k3b will rip audio cd’s and jripper is fairly comprehensive too.
Video conversion should be easy enough. avidemux or Handbrake (both from Packman)
well the saga continues. I emailed Philips support and sadly they returned with Sorry, player will not work on linux. That was after I already had it working. I sent back and told them it was working - they replied they would look into it.
The video format of this player is .smv. I found a .deb pkg and converted it to .rpm using alien. Haven’t tried it out yet, tho’
I’ve always been curious about different format. This .smv was a new one to me. Multimediawiki has this to say about it: SMV - MultimediaWiki
The Sigma Tel Motion Video Format (SMV) is a simple format used by many small media players that have the capability of playing video. … An SMV file is composed of three sections, concatenated together:
- A .wav file for the audio stream, with a conventional WAV header.
- An SMV header, described below.
- An array of .jpeg files for the video stream, with headers, each prepended by a 24-bit (3 byte) little-endian value representing the size of the image and buffered at the end with nulls.
When I searched for a Linux package to convert to SMV it was not so easy. None of the conventional packages at first appeared to offer conversion, but I note the wiki page makes reference to smvconv smv_encode and to smv-show SMV-show | Get SMV-show at SourceForge.net
I assume you found a debian version of one of those two applications and use alien converted it to debian? I have not researched this thoroughly, but its possible either or both of those packages will need ffmpeg and libffmpeg to function properly. Sometimes when one converts with alien, the dependency conversion does not work as well.
Good luck.
I successfully ?? converted the smv_encode .deb pkg tp a .rpm
and tried it. Seems it went well. Have converted a few .mp4’s to .smv’s.
Altho’ I can’t seem to change the video size to fit my screen, but its not that much smaller, and it may be just that I don’t know the proper screen size to adjust it to.
Still haven’t heard back from Philips, other than to say they would be looking into it. The player is working well and what else do I really need from them. If only I could get my Sony mp3 player to work too! [Model NW-S203F if anyone cares to comment]
All in All it has been another interesting exercise in learning more about what the Linux experience can offer.
Pretty neat that you were able to solve this.
I suppose you could send Phillips a short email, noting how you solved the problem, and they could then (if they wished) take it ‘onboard’ so as to help anyone else who may contact them.
oldcpu
thank you you are right I will send them directions for this
better to give them the info rather than smuggly deny them.
maybe it will be a step towards them giving support to us non-windows users.
One small step, etc.