Movie/Video formats on Still digital cameras

Question

I've purchased a no-name digital picture frame for friends for the holidays. While I've got sample
pictures they've taken with their digital camera to play fine on the frame, I'm primarily interested in editing some of their home-videos with Final Cut Pro and getting them to play on the digital frame.
They recorded their movies on a mini-dv camera and I've digitized the files into FCP fine.
The instructions with the frame say it will play video formats MPEG 1,2 and 4, but doesn't give any specifics beyond that on size, frame rate or other conditions of those three formats which will make movie videos compatible for the frame. As it's a no-name frame, there is no customer service information to whom I can address the question.
I fully realize that I may need some format very specific to this frame, and it may be a trial and error game for me, but I'm wondering if any readers of this forum are also familiar with the Movie Mpeg 1,2,4 files recorded by most still digital cameras, and can provide any additional info on how I might need to create the MPEG video so it will be compatible with the frame. I'm sure I can use FCP export, Compressor or Quicktime export once I know the right specifics.
I surmise that all these digital frames that promote the fact that they play video are talking about the movies (video) that many of these still digital cameras can create and playback internally. That's the video format I'm trying to replicate and find out more about. Any additional information would be helpful for me.
Thanks.

Answer 1

If you can make a movie in the MPEG-4 format it should be useable regardless of the frame rate or size. The optimal size usually is 640 x 480. I've found in my digital frame I need to put the items in a folder on the memory card instead of the root directory of the card. The frame can see the folder(s) and play from there. I guess it's because the card is formated FAT 16 and can't take many items in the root directory. The only issue is size of the movie file. The smaller you can make it the better it will probably play.
My Canon camera creates 640 x 480 H.264 files at 29.7 fps which is the .mp4 format.
Just be sure to have vanilla file names as the cards are PC based and choke on non standard characeter, i.e. 0-9 and a-z. No spaces in the file name, underscores or dashes only.
Do you Twango?
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