Codec Compatibility Chart

The MVix MX-760HD is a neat little device, and I’ve had fun fiddling with it. In order to help others who might be interested in it, I’ve documented some of the media formats it supports.

I use GNU/Linux as my operating system, and when possible I prefer to use Free Software and open codecs. The latter is currently impossible when it comes to multi-channel audio, at least as far as I’ve found so far. Various external factors do influence my decisions with respect to codecs, as well. For example, my wife has an ipod, which doesn’t natively support Ogg Vorbis audio; so all of our CDs will be ripped to MP3 format.

Finally, I tried to play each file on my media player. I had to rename the OGM files to .mpeg before the MX-760HD would recognize them as movies it could (try to) play. It’s a bit disappointing to note that the Ogg container format isn’t supported at all by the MX-760HD; though the Vorbis audio codec is supported. As such, I’ve excluded it from the tables below, and instead listed only those container formats that actually produce some playable output on the MX-760HD.

Here’s a PDF of all the codec combinations and how they fared in the players I tried.

Xvid is an open implementation of the MP4 standard, so I’ve chosen it as the video codec to use when ripping movies. I’m still fiddling with options that affect quality and file size. So far, I’ve been doing two-pass encodings with large target sizes (2 - 3 GB), rather than constant bitrates.

Since most DVDs have multi-channel audio, a feature I wish to preserve, I will use AC3 as the audio codec when ripping DVDs. For source media that lacks multi-channel audio, I’ll likely continue to use AC3, for convenience sake (since I’m scripting many of these operations), but I may elect to use Vorbis, since it’s an open codec.

Feel free to post suggestions in the comments, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked!