MTV

• Extension: mtv (or amv)
• Samples: [1]
  
  

MTV video origin and history

The MTV Video format was created to allow video playback capabilities on inexpensive Chinese-made portable MP3 players without increasing the cost of those players with the license royalties (and more processor power). These Chinese MP4/MTV Player (sold as "MP4 Player" or "PMP", for Personal Media Player) are flash based digital audio players, mostly manufactured in China, capable of viewing images, videos, and text files. Although commonly called MP4 players, they are unable to play true MP4 (MPEG-4 AVC H.264) formated videos and are limited to the proprietary file formats such as MTV, DMV, MPV, ACT and AMV. They are a kind of the S1 MP3 Player. This is beginning to change however, as more and more top-branded portable players are starting to support true MP4 (MPEG-4 AVC H.264) video files.

MTV Video Format

The format operates by displaying a series of raw image frames while playing MP3 audio. Video compression ratio is low, compared with other formats, though as the files are of low resolution and frame rate, file sizes are small compared to MPEG-1 or [MPEG-2]. (in a bytes-per-minute sense). Encoding and decoding are less processor-intensive than other contemporary formats (i.e. faster to encode on, say, desktop computer, and less hard on the batteries of the portable device), as in fact very little "encoding" is actually done

The MTV format consists of a 512 byte file header, followed by alternating image and audio frames. While the audio frames are encoded with MPEG1 Audio Layer 3 (a.k.a. MP3), the image information is stored in uncompressed raw format, according to the player's display hardware specification.

During decoding of the video stream, the audio frames are passed to the MP3 hardware decoder, while the memory pointer of the display hardware is simply adjusted to the next raw image within the video stream. While this concept does not require additional * hardware for the decoding process, it leads to huge memory requirements as no compression is applied to the image information. For this reason the storage capacity of an MP4 player is effectively much less than that of a player that decompresses files on the fly.

MTV vs. [MPEG-2] (using typical values/approximations):

Note! These MTV/AMV calculations are based on 30 minutes at 128 x 96 pixels, 12 frame/s, 22050 sample/s mono sound : 80 MB (approx) The audio is 22050 sample/s, mono, MP3(?) - a safe guess would be a maximum of 10 MB being audio, yielding 70 MB for video, or approximately 40,000 bytes per second.)

file	Approx. data rate	Resolution (pixels)	Frame rate	Pixels per second	Pixels per byte
AMV	40,000 B/s	128 x 96 = 12,288	12 fps	147,456	~3.5
DVD (MPEG2-PAL)	> 1,000,000 B/s	704 x 576 = ~400,000	25 fps	~10,000,000	~10

Conversion anbd transcoding utilities

• www.mympxplayer.org - MP4 resource site and support forum, with MTV conversion/transcoding tools and utilies, (plus sample downloads)
  
  
  

Software media player known to play MTV files

• Unknown

Hardware media player known to play MTV files

Chinese-made portable MP3 players, also known as S1 MP3 Players.

External Links

• "Chinese-made portable MP3 player" article on wikipedia.org
• "S1 MP3 Player" article on wikipedia.org
• www.mympxplayer.org - MP4 resource site and support forum, MTV conversion/transcoding tools and utilies, plus sample downloads
• MTV Video topic-thread on moviecodec.com forum
• MP4 Player Search - Community powered and driven
• MP4 Nation Knowledge Base: Support and tips on MP4 Players
• An introduction to MP4 players, what they do, what you can do to them and a review
• Recovering dead players and other software
• MP4 Forums on S1MP3.org
• MTV Video Forum
• (A very negative) video-review of one of these MP4-Player on Youtube