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I have an overhead projector that supports playing data from USB sticks. For videos it has the following limitations (quotes from the user manual):

  • file type: AVI
  • The audio format can only playback linear PCM and ADPCM.
  • Supports AVI 1.0.

So I have an AVI file but when I try to play it, the projector says: Cannot play.

So how do I find out if my AVI file has the given properties?

And if not, what can I do to turn it into a file with given properties?

Probably ffmpeg/ffprobe can do this, but what commands do I need to use? (I would like to use ffmpeg/ffprobe because it is already installed. Only if ffmpeg/ffprobe cannot do this, I am open to alternatives.)

Kjara
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    AVI 1.0 is very very old. You may need to use a conversion software of the same vintage. – ChanganAuto May 10 '23 at 21:52
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    `ffprobe filename.avi` I mean, that's probably the first thing you've tried :) But @ChanganAuto is fully on point: AVI 1.0 is old (but not completely obsolete), but restriction of audio to "PCM and ADPCM" (PCM is completely uncompresed audio, and ADPCM is basically only used in low-quality voice communications… so nothing you want for watching movies) definitely means the projector cannot absorb modern (as in: last 20 years) variable-frame size stream data. In other words, your video would have to be nearly uncompressed as well, and you'll spend quite some time finding the one video codec it – Marcus Müller May 11 '23 at 06:28
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    supports; the manual just doesn't mention the video codecs the player supports. Maybe because the manual isn't very good, or maybe the list of formats would have revealed the USB playback feature to be a useless gimmick in practice. – Marcus Müller May 11 '23 at 06:31
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    (and, yeah, no AVI container video file you will encounter in the wild, ever, will have uncompressed audio, so you will have to transcode anyways. But as said, your manual tells us only what it accepts in sound, but not what in video codec. I don't have any trust this thing will play anything that's useful for your purpose; I mean, not supporting MPEG-1 Audio Layer II compressed audio puts this player *below* the league of 1993 VideoCD players, so it's totally unclear what it *does* support. What we *can* infer from your manual excerpt is that it's very old.) – Marcus Müller May 11 '23 at 06:34
  • It's the Epson EB-W28 Projector. Internet says it was discontinued in January 2016. (We bought it end of 2015 not knowing this, but the price was alright. ;) ) Okay, since its requirements for this are outdated, I will just stick with playing my video on the computer with HDMI cable attached. – Kjara May 11 '23 at 12:00
  • More details are in p.50 of the user's manual: The supported codec is **MJPEG** (Motion JPEG), resolution up to **1280x720**, audio format **linear PCM** and **ADPCM** only and file size no larger than 2GB in FAT16/32 . – ChanganAuto May 11 '23 at 16:27

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