Coby MP715-4G in Linux/Unix/BSD

I have a Coby MP715-4G portable media player. It works well in Linux/Unix/FreeBSD without any proprietry software. I will give instructions. To mount it, first go into its setup menu and change the USB option to MSC. That will make it appear as a regular USB mass storage device to Linux. Disconnect the player from USB and turn it off. Then plug it into the computer by USB. Wait about ten seconds. Then mount it with a command like

mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/foo

This assumes that it is detected by Linux and given the name sda. You can find out what name it is given by viewing the kernel log with dmesg. This also assumes that you have a /mnt/foo/ directory to use as a mount point. The MP715-4G is nice because it plays several open media formats. To prepare movies for it, you must convert them to one of the specific formats that it accepts, including the specific parameters. Assuming that you have a big AVI file of a movie, and you want to make it play on the MP715-4G, this is what you can do:

ffmpeg -i in.avi -r 20 -s 320x240 -vtag "xvid" -b 128k -ar 44100 out.avi

Without setting the VTAG to "xvid", the player will give an "invalid format" error and refuse to play the video. With the audio sample rate at 48000, the audio/video synchronization was not good. 44100 works much better. Two-pass encoding would also probably be better, but I haven't had time to play with that. In case it matters, the version of ffmpeg that I am using is as follows:

[kurt@kurt ~]$ ffmpeg --help
FFmpeg version SVN-r14424, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --cc=cc --prefix=/usr/local --disable-debug 
	--enable-memalign-hack --enable-shared --enable-postproc 
	--extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/include/vorbis -I/usr/local/include 
	--extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/lib -la52 --extra-libs=-pthread 
	--enable-gpl --enable-pthreads --enable-swscale --mandir=/usr/local/man 
	--enable-liba52 --enable-liba52bin --disable-libfaac --enable-libfaad 
	--enable-libfaadbin --disable-libamr-nb --disable-libamr-wb --disable-mmx 
	--disable-libgsm --disable-libmp3lame --disable-ffplay --enable-libtheora 
	--enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --disable-libxvid
  libavutil version: 49.7.0
  libavcodec version: 51.61.0
  libavformat version: 52.18.0
  libavdevice version: 52.0.0
  built on Aug 23 2008 14:32:12, gcc: 4.2.1 20070719  [FreeBSD]

So far, I like the MP715-4G a lot. Unlike my Archos 105, it plays video formats that can be generated with free software. It will play 160x120 videos, but it doesn't scale them to fit the screen, so it is like watching an animated postage stamp.