« Good uses for a DOG
Beren’s Yukon Mouse Tale »

Resizing photos and videos for a Coby Widescreen Digital Photo Frame

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:

  1. The manual is garbage.
  2. Coby tech support doesn’t return email.
  3. The real resolution is 720 x 468, NOT 480 x 234 as the manual reports
  4. You have to stretch your images’ height at a ratio of 15:13 (115.384615384615 %) to get them to display correctly.
  5. 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.
  6. 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 :-P

Here is a sample image I transformed in Photoshop while figuring those things out:

Coby widescreen photo frame test image

So the procedure for resizing stuff for the frame should be:

  1. Stretch it vertically about 115% (see above)
  2. 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!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Resizing photos and videos for a Coby Widescreen Digital Photo Frame”

  1. nathan Says:
    January 28th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    And here’s a recipe for using the command-line tool convert which comes with ImageMagick:

    convert -resize 100%x115% foo.jpg

  2. nathan Says:
    April 18th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    TNO! Evidently, this Coby frame can only access the first approximately 512 files on the memory card. Still no firmware update available. Losers.

  3. nathan Says:
    April 18th, 2008 at 5:22 pm

    Hah. Spoke my mind in an Amazon review. Take that, Coby.

  4. nathan Says:
    May 12th, 2008 at 9:36 am

    Over a few days, there must be some sort of memory leak because the image moves left, leaving a black stripe at the right of the screen. I’ve discovered two workarounds, besides turning it off and on which means you have to reset your settings:

    1. If you toggle between 4:3 and 16:9 and back with the remote, the black stripe is reset.

    2. Apparently, if you leave the cheesy animation effects enabled (setup button on the remote, photo, transition), it prevents the problem.

  5. nathan Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    oops, apparently only the “random” cheesy animation setting prevents the black bar.

Leave a Reply