TLDR

In short, this is an AGPTEK M6 MP3 player that I loaded up with several thousand media files onto a 1 TB microSD card. I did this because I wanted a way to consume my media offline, not just leasing it from a service, and modern phones have removed the microSD card slot and the AUX port.

Contents of SD card

[Disclaimer: I realize that I probably will never go through all of this content. But the idea is that I'd like to not be so dependent on streaming services to get all of my entertainment.]

• South Park S00-S28 w/ movies
• Squatters E01-E04
• Simpsons S00-S30 w/ movies
• Myth Busters 2003-2016
• It's Always Sunny S01-S14
• The last 5 videos from each of my ~550 YouTube subscriptions
• The same thing as above, but just the audio portion (for screen-off listening)
• All of my music
• Tens of thousands of stories from r/nosleep (they are not great quality...)
• A handful of real E-books
• Some cute pictures of my dog

Challenges with this project

The last couple months have been a long journey to getting what I wanted from this player. Each component was it's own project, and I learned a lot.

• Getting videos to play: This player comes with some software for converting videos. Unfortunately, videos converted manually using tools like ffmpeg were unsuccessful, as the device refused to play them. This was probably the most difficult problem to solve. At first glace, it would seem like I just had a few settings wrong, here and there. That was absolutely not the case. The truth was that this player advertised (or at least plays) H.264 videos, but it's implementation was so restrictive, it is more similar to MJPEG than true H.264. I had to patch (with the help of Cursor) libx264 and recompile ffmpeg around it. If anyone wants the full details of what needed to be patched, let me know and I will write a reply, but it is lengthy.
• Getting the videos to not be enormous: After finally getting videos to play, I realized that due to the strict restrictions around the device's video decoder, we are losing a lot of compression efficiency. This means that the videos need a very high bitrate to look acceptable, and thus a large file size. This led me to learning about video compression and how I could get the files to be even smaller. It boiled down to making incremental optimizations, which allowed me to crank the compression further without as much quality loss. I got the videos from ~2.2 Mbps all the way down to ~500 kbps. Essentially, I cut the video size down by roughly 80%. A 1 hour clip used to be around 1 GB in file size, and it is now around 200 Mb. I did take some liberties when compressing the video. I realized that I didn't need it to look perfect, it just had to look acceptable from a regular viewing distance. As with the audio, I took the same principles. If you look closely at the video, or even just at a regular distance, there are noticeable artifacts due to the strong compression. However, I decided that I was fine with making that trade-off in exchange for more storage capacity.
• Download -> Convert pipeline: The original goal of this project was to get my latest uploaded YouTube videos from my subscriptions from the last 24 hours, and send them to the device for offline playback. I wrote a program to perform the downloading, extracting, and converting for every single file format that the device supports: videos, audio, images, and text. Then, I wrote another program to hook it up to, which downloads my videos and then converts them to the perfect format for my devices. I set up a way for GitHub to automatically do this for me; all I'd have to do was transfer the files to my device.
• Deciphering MP3 player video formats: After figuring out how to make videos play on my device, I got curious about how other devices worked. I purchased a large quantity of devices, including MP3 players, MP4 players, handheld game consoles, dumbphones (r/dumphone), essentially, any device that could play videos that was not a smart device. I made sure to create converters for each device profile (some were identical, but there are ~19 profiles now, meaning that each profile requires a unique conversion to work), and uploaded them to my project.

Thoughts

Overall, this project was extremely educational for me. Part of me feels like I wasted money purchasing so many devices, just to reverse engineer them and put them away. Thankfully, each device costed no more than $18, and most were in the $10 or less range. I may be able to repurpose or gift some of these devices. I also recognize that perhaps I really do not need this much content. But there is something very attractive about knowing that I own these files now, and I'll have access to them. There won't be any software updates to slow my MP3 player down, there won't be any AI, they won't track all of my behavior with ads and algorithms, and best of all, they won't be able to remove, replace, or otherwise ruin the things I like. There's probably some deep insecurity that compels me to do this type of archiving, but I can't figure it out.

If anyone wants information or has any questions, I would love to answer.

Here's the projects I built for this:

• https://github.com/tytydraco/mp3c
• https://github.com/tytydraco/ytdlmp3
• https://github.com/tytydraco/ffmpeg-yp3-patch
• https://github.com/tytydraco/pgscr
• https://github.com/tytydraco/srf
• https://github.com/tytydraco/mp3dict
• https://github.com/tytydraco/mp3maps
• https://github.com/tytydraco/atj-avi-encoder

EDIT: also, I could easily make these videos look perfect if I wanted, but it would bloat the file size past what I'd be happy with. Just wanted to say that it's my fault, not the player's.

You'll need some experience using command line applications to set up the program, but it is really easy. I have a personal objective to see if I could live life comfortably without internet or smart-devices; I know it's not very practical. More of a hobby project. Maybe some of you will find it interesting.

https://github.com/tytydraco/mp3maps

I recently purchased the AGPTEK M6 MP3 player (excellent, by the way), and I already own a RUIZU X52 as well. These players support some interesting features like video, text, and images, but they require specific encoding to work, otherwise they will show a format error. So I build a couple tools to make it easier to do!

#1: mp3c

mp3c is a device-specific file converter that supports audio, video, images, and text. It will take any format and convert it for each dedicated device profile. For example, the same video can be converted for both players (320x240, and 128x128), with all the necessary rotation and padding done automatically. It can convert e-books and images of any type as well.

#2: ytdlmp3

Similar to the first project, but it's centered around downloading YouTube videos from a certain recent time frame (last 2 weeks) so that you can always get the latest videos for offline YouTube watching/listening.

If you want to use these programs, you might need to build your own converter script in the converters folder. It's easy to do, it's just a simple FFMPEG command and a file extension name. You can make it highly specific to your player to get the best quality.

https://github.com/tytydraco/mp3c
https://github.com/tytydraco/ytdlmp3

These projects are a little technical, so I'm sure most people won't have a good use for this. But if you are experiencing with the command line or Linux, you should have an easy time with this.

A docker file is also included so you can get this up and running on any machine, even Windows and Mac (not tested yet, but theoretically it should work perfectly).

Really enjoying my new player, just wanted to share what I've been working on!