So for Christmas, I received a Coby DP-769 7″ WIDESCREEN DIGITAL PHOTO FRAME with MP3 PLAYER. Pretty cool, right?
I played with (reverse engineered) it a bunch today, trying to get photos and videos to display correctly, and I have several important conclusions:
- The manual is garbage.
- Coby tech support doesn’t return email.
- The real resolution is 720 x 468, NOT 480 x 234 as the manual reports
- You have to stretch your images’ height at a ratio of 15:13 (115.384615384615 %) to get them to display correctly.
- The only video/audio encodings I could get to work are xvid for video and mp3 for audio, with an AVI format. I’m a total newbie at that stuff though.
- Nobody else on teh Internets seems to have paved the way so it’s up to little old me!!!
I’m guessing most of those things apply to their other widescreen products 
Here is a sample image I transformed in Photoshop while figuring those things out:
So the procedure for resizing stuff for the frame should be:
- Stretch it vertically about 115% (see above)
- Crop/resize to a 720 x 468 rectangle
Here’s the gist of the mencoder recipe (mencoder can accept original files in lots of formats):
Crop top and bottom of a 4:3 video and size to fit the photo frame:
mencoder "original.AVI" -ofps 24000/1001 -vf scale=720:623,crop=720:468 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=500 -o "./photoframe/for_coby_ws.avi" -oac mp3lame -srate 32000
To add black regions to a 4:3 video and size to frame for a “letterbox” effect, change the ‘vf’ (video filter) parameter to:
scale=540:468,expand=720:468
And here’s an Action file for Photoshop, to make resizing photos easy. Enjoy!