Your Owner's manual lists the formats and bit rates supported. If you don't have an Owner's manual, you can download one for your vehicle on VW's site.

 

I have the owners manual. It also says SD card up to 32GB max. I am using a 128GB SD card and the music files still show up and the movies are showing but can't click them to open them.

 

You can run a 1 TB SD card, but what it's formatted as is a different story. Not many tools will format 128GB partitions as FAT32 and fewer devices will read them.
I'd suggest starting at the officially supported sizes, formats, and bit rates, and play around from there. If you don't have a 32GB card, just partition it to 32GB and format it as FAT32- leave the rest of the space unpartitioned for now.
Check your video size and bit rates- make sure those are in spec.
Page 272ish in your Owner's Manual should give you the specs of what the Touareg will play.

 

what about the format does it need to be MP4 or AVI etc

 

Page 272 of the 2015 Touareg manual has all the info.

 

have you tried other formats ? Re-formatted the sd card ? Maybe it does need the small card have you tried that

 

Yes I reformatted the SD card on my mac book pro within that Disk Utility App. Changed it to MS-DOS FAT (FAT32). I have some movies working now. And music files work. Not all my movies/videos work though. I think i'll have to re-format them in a program called "Hand break". Unless anyone has a better recommendation. Thanks!

 

Ironically my 16 TDI LUX ONLY plays movies in the AVI format. I did not buy it new so the previous owner may have changed something. Not a big issue to me just making sure it is known that AVI files do play on the media system contrary to what the manual says.

Sent from my ASUS_Z01GD using Tapatalk

 

The manual DOES indicate .avi container is supported-
Format: ISOMPEG4;
DivX 3, 4 and
5 Xvid (.avi).

 

Yes I have the manual and have changed the format via the Disk Utility app on my MacBook pro to FAT32. Since that I can see the music files and they work. The video files are showing but they do not work. It skips right past them and onto the next song. So obviously I feel it could be the bit rate or the max 720p perhaps. I'm going to try that today and tweak it. I have seen that it might require a program called "Handbrake".... has anyone else known of this? And does that make sense?

 

Yes, Handbrake is a good utility to transcode video. Use your existing file as an input and just make sure your output settings fall within specs. Make sure your Audio falls within the specs as well.
Speaking from personal experience, a 64GB SD card formatted to 64GB FAT32 will work. I dunno about 128GB. I would encourage you to get everything working to your liking following specs, before you start experimenting. I understand video can be quite finicky on the Touareg.
Another point from personal experience- unsupported formats and bit rates will show in the directory on the Touareg, but will not play. I accidentally got some WMA Lossless and Apple Lossless M4a on there- displayed in the directory but just skipped over them when playing.
Another point- I've had mixed success with m4a encoded as variable bit rate. For the Touareg, I encode to 256 CBR m4a. It will play any MP3, as max bit rate for mp3 is 320.

 

I use "Easy YouTube Video Downloader Express" plugin (Mozilla Firefox) to download youtube videos. I use 320p mp4 and they work great on sd card.

 

Easy YouTube Video Downloader Express

does this extension convert to AVI also ?

 

Thanks so far everyone. I've got some of the movies working that i had on an old external hard drive. Put them onto the SD 128GB card..... and some of them are working. Some are poor quality video but some are half decent. I'm guessing I just have to try and experiment and put some into hand break and make sure the output is within specs.
If anyone knows a better way or fix for this inconvenience let me know!

 

Anyone familiar with the Program "Hand Break"? I'm wondering if you can create Chapters within a movie? When i watch a movie on the Touareg via the SD card input slot, it won't skip to another chapter. It just goes right to the next track. I'd have to fast forward which would take forever. And on some videos the fast forward option doesn't even work.

 

You'd probably do better on some video transcoding forums, or the HandBrake forum for help. Worse come to worse, I'd steer you towards PowerDVD (Free Trial iirc) or another product that will hold your hand through the operation.
You can play DVDs as-is, if that helps.

 

mp3 and mp4 only
mp4 videos with 320p work great on RNS850

 

I've been experimenting with the audio transcoding tab and there are always two lines of audio track. Should I be leaving them as AAC and A3..... or should i be transcoding them to MP3? I did code to MP3 usually but i'm noticing the sound quality seems junk when i did that. FYI i'm talking about the audio for a movie that i'm trying to transcode. Not a music file or song.

 

Make sure in Handbrake, you use H264 baseline 1.3. Higher revisions are not friendly to RNS850

with baseline 1.3, you can crank up resolution and bit rate and video files would still play

 

Video formats are a bit of a mess for the lay person.

AVI, WMV, ASF, MKV, and (confusingly) MP4 are containers. They let you combine a video file, audio file, chapter info, subtitles, etc. into a single "video file" for playback. If you double-click a file with these extensions and get video and audio, then it's just a container file. The video inside it could be encoded in any variety of formats.

MPEG1 (not used anymore), MPEG2 (used to encode DVDs), h.264 (aka MPEG4, often confusingly abbreviated MP4), h.265 (aka HEVC), VP9, AV1, are video formats (codecs). Methods for compressing video (and only video).

The trick is to get the video encoded in a video codec and container format the car recognizes. MP4 (MPEG4 container with h.264 video) should work since it's on the list. But since MP4 is just a container, it can actually contain video encoded with a different codec. If someone manually did the encode, it may not be a h.264 MP4 file.

I haven't played around with it on my Treg, but more than likely the limitation is the 720x576 resolution limit. If you have videos encoded at a larger resolution, you'll need to re-encode it at the lower resolution (720x576 for 4:3 movies, 720x404 or 720x400 for 16:9 movies). Handbrake can indeed be used to do this. Make sure on the video tab, you click the Fast Decode option, as that generates an output file with maximum compatibility (at the cost of slightly larger file size). Handbrake should default to encoding with h.264 (MPEG4), but you'll probably want to double-check it to make sure it's not using a newer codec like h.265 that the car doesn't support. The other suggestions RocketTech made are all good too.

One place I would not recommend Handbrake for is converting DVDs. DVDs use interlaced video, and Handbrake has a terrible deinterlacer/decomb filter which will turn diagonal lines jagged. It's fine if you don't care about these things, but it annoys me to no end. The program I use (StaxRip) is way too complicated for the lay person. Try videohelp.com for suggestions on an all-in-one DVD conversion program and guides.

VideoHelp - Forum and Software downloads

Video forums, video software downloads, guides, blu-ray players and media.

www.videohelp.com

Adding chapters requires a chapter file. It's just a text file with the chapter name, and the time or frame index. Unfortunately, Handbrake doesn't support creating them. If the original video had chapters, Handbrake will import them and will let you rename then. But it doesn't have any way for you to create new chapter markers. Try some of the other chapter editing tools available. (Also note that the container format and playback device needs to support chapters for it to work. MP4 does. The original AVI format doesn't, though it was added later as an extension. I dunno if the RNS850 supports chapters.)

Video Software Downloads - VideoHelp

Download free video and audio software. Old versions, user reviews, version history, screenshots.

www.videohelp.com

AAC is preferable for audio encoding (it was supposed to be the upgraded replacement for MP3). In addition to not being as good, AC3 suffers from licensing issues - if your player is not licensed for AC3 (hasn't paid a fee to the patent holders), the video will play but the AC3 audio will not.

I don't see AAC on the supported audio format list though. It may work though. Some of the music on my SD card in FLC format worked (others came out distorted, I assume because of too high a bitrate).

Usually multiple audio streams are included for different languages, or one is stereo (2-channel left/right) and the other is 5.1 ( center front-left/front-right/rear-left/rear-right and subwoofer). I have no idea if the RNS850 supports 5.1, although if it does it would definitely be preferable over stereo.

 

AAC is supported- it's the last audio codec detailed in the documentation. It was included in post #6- the huge chart of supported formats and bitrates. Can't miss it.

2 channel and 6 channel (5.1) PCM are supported

I don't see AAC on the supported audio format list though. It may work though. Some of the music on my SD card in FLC format worked (others came out distorted, I assume because of too high a bitrate).

Usually multiple audio streams are included for different languages, or one is stereo (2-channel left/right) and the other is 5.1 ( center front-left/front-right/rear-left/rear-right and subwoofer). I have no idea if the RNS850 supports 5.1, although if it does it would definitely be preferable over stereo.