[awraynor]

I attached a file and hopefully it came across okay. This was a much better solution so far. The downside is you can't charge the iPad while the AV adapter is in place, but is working well so far. As soon as you insert the adapter the AV outputs through the HDMI cable.

Just ask any additional questions you have. Ours is a Sienna XLE Premium so I don't know if a Highlander would have this? We traded a 2013 Highlander Limited (old body style) with DVD and it didn't have HDMI. I don't know if it is an option in the new body style

I now they tout the ability to play through an SD card, but the execution is pretty bad. As mentioned ours played mp4 files which is a more common format than AVCHD, but navigation through a folder structure is pretty awkward for a young child.

 

[jeffinkentucky]

I attached a file and hopefully it came across okay. This was a much better solution so far. The downside is you can't charge the iPad while the AV adapter is in place, but is working well so far. As soon as you insert the adapter the AV outputs through the HDMI cable.

Just ask any additional questions you have. Ours is Sienna XLE Premium so I don't know if a Highlander would have this?

Oh, that is why I have not seen it. I haven't really looked but your pic looks different than the Highlander. Our OEM Bluray system looks more like an afterthought than OEM. Thanks for sharing!

 

[s99klein]

This is exactly my experience with my 2015 sienna. (I can view mp4's created with handbrake with no issues. I rip the DVD's using DVD Shrink). One key reason I decided to buy the new 2015 over a few year old one was for the new RES with the SD card. I knew I could put a giant catalog of MP4 videos on it and never have to carry a DVD. Well, due to how awfully Toyota designed the SD interface, my wife won't use it and instead carries DVD's. Would it really have been that hard to have it read a list of the files and give you a folder tree. It somewhat shows that in the interface, but as everyone else has said there's no way to interact with it. And I too read about the jumping to file number, but have not found a way to do that either. This seems like something Toyota could fix easily with a firmware update. I wonder how we can get Toyota's attention? I guess they really don't care since we've already bought the system. Sux!

 

[ou814us2]

Has anyone had any luck with adding more than one movie? Opening post, have you done any more testing? Thanks!

 

[corza]

Hey guys,

multiAVCHD from the front page is very easy to use. Just add the videos you want on your SD card, into the list, then play around through the menus to add a menu so you can select which file you want to view easily. Then click start, Select PlayStation (Top one about Panasonic Blu Ray Player), and let the software do the work for you. Once done make sure that it ends up on the SDCARD in /PRIVATE/AVCHD .. easy as!

 

[bmn001]

Hiya guys

Posting here because I just got a 2016 Highlander with this godawful rear-seat entertainment system with the SD slot that only supports AVCHD disc images. Glad to see I'm not the only one scratching their head on this POS design decision.

This thread seems to be the definitive source on Google right now for making videos that this system can handle. I jumped through hoops to install multiAVCHD using the info here like everyone else and managed to get a working image that had a few videos on it after hours of trial and error.

But here's what I didn't like. multiAVCHD is a true pain in the ass to install and use AND it looks like it's been abandoned by its author several years ago.

So I found another piece of software that can do everything multiAVCHD can do, but is much easier to use, is still supported, and is being actively developed. It takes all your videos in whatever format they happen to be and wraps them all in a nice looking menu.

You literally drag and drop the videos you want to include, select one of like a dozen templates to use for the menu, tell it how big your SD card is, and hit 'go'. It then transcodes everything at the highest bitrate it can while staying within the maximum size limit of your SD card. Like...it's crazy how many movies you can squeeze into 64GB. The overall video quality takes a small hit every time you add one so you don't want to get too nuts, but this software really lets you cram 'em in there (and tells you what % of compression you're looking at with every add).

I'm happy to write up a tutorial if anyone needs it, but you really shouldn't need one.

That's the good news. The bad news is it's not free. I won't link to it directly here, but it's called "ConvertXtoVideo".

The other downside is that it takes forever. It took about an hour to generate an AVCHD image that contained just three two-hour movies. multiAVCHD is somehow able to integrate mp4s without transcoding them and that speeds things up a TON, but ConvertXtoVideo insists on transcoding whatever you throw at it, no matter the source format, and that means it takes a whole lot longer.

multiAVCHD works pretty well and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from using a free option. But if you don't want to F around with installing codec packs from ten years ago and digging through forum threads on doom9 for help, you've got at least one other option.

 

[abbytreasures]

Help with 2009 Sienna rear DVD

So I must say that I'm not superb at technical things, but I can limp along. I am trying to figure out how to get a youtube video onto DVD so my kids can watch it in my 2009 Sienna. It appears from the manual that it requires Mpeg2, so after I had tried mp4 and failed, I chose mpg as the output. Neither worked and just gives me Check Disc errors. I'm hoping it's just something simple that I'm missing, and one of you can help? I'm using VLC to convert.

Help! <please>

 

[mz7]

Boy am I glad to have stumbled across this post. Hopefully, recent Toyota models are more advanced. For those of us with older vehicles, below is how I got this to work on my 2013 Sequoia. Thanks to the posts before me, without which I would not have figured this out.

I used DVDfab to backup/rip my DVDs, and then multiAVCHD to transfer a 64GB SD card. My vehicle manual stated that SDXC cards had to be exFAT formatted.

For DVDfab, I found that I had to use these settings for both DVDs and Bluerays:

Container: MP4
Codec: H.264
Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Audio:
Codec: MP3
Channels: stereo

With any other video channels setting, or video resolution, the SD would either not read, or the video would only show on 1/2 the screen or not at all.

multiAVCHD was a tad finicky, but not bad. I installed the default program and did not have to mess with any codec, etc. You have to have a specified directory structure. I created a directory F:\PRIVATE. Then, on the lower left of multiAVCHD, I chose that directory. The program then created the F:\PRIVATE\AVCHD directory:

Add all of the .mp4 files that you want. Hit START, and then at the upper left, choose "Panasonic Blu-ray players". All of the files will be converted to AVCHD in a manner that can be read by my RSES. I found that all .mp4's had to be converted at one go. If I wanted to add another movie, I had to redo the entire playlist.

On the RSES, I did not have random access to the titles. However, on my remote, there are for/rev buttons to navigate between titles/movies, so it's not too cumbersome. This was a lot of trouble, but it beats having to sit through all of the nonsense previews, etc on DVDs. My kids are young and I have to run the remote from the front seat, so being able to have multiple movies loaded up is invaluable.

 

[becstarc]

Hi Everyone from Australia,

My wife and I just bought a new 2014 Highlander Grande (well Kluger Grande down here in Australia) with the Rear Seat Entertainment system. Being and IT professional and an A/V techhead with three kids I was interested to see that it had the ability to play of an SD card.

After reading the manual and a lot of reading on the net, including reading threads started by other Toyota owners I couldn't find anywhere where someone had any luck getting it to work well.

SO long story short I spent the last 3 days scouring the internet for conversion programs and trial and error I'm happy to report I seem to have got my first video to work....YAY! I've just managed to do this like 10 mins ago and I will be trying methods to get multiple videos on the SD card to read and play so I will update this thread as I go, but for now here is an outline of what I did.

Basically I took a standard .mp4 video of around 130mb and through the process below converted it to AVCHD format on an SDHC (16GB) Card and played in in the RSES on the toyota.

Step 1. Make sure your card is correctly formatted, that means for most of us either FAT32 for cards 4gb-16gb or EXFAT for 16gb-32gb. This can be done easily in windows by putting your card into an SD Card reader or if your using a laptop like me the SD Card slot on your laptop.

Step 2. Go and download MULTIAVCHD v4.1 from this link
multiAVCHD 4.1.771 Free Download - VideoHelp
Now please be aware that only the TOP link ie "Visit developers Site" seems to work well and the version it downloads it not the latest release i.e. its not build 771. For some reason I couldnt find this build on the net, but when you start the program it will ask you if you want to update it, for some other reason this took a fair number of tries for it to finally update for me, not sure why.

Step 3. Run MULTIAVCHD and click "Add Video File" - Choose your mp4 video (Im still testing avi's)

Step 4. Set your Destination Path (down the bottom left) to be your SDCard Drive. This is not strictly necessary as you can set it to be a directory on your hard drive and then copy the AVCHD folder over later to your SDCard

Step5. and the click "Start" and choose Panasonic Blu Ray Player. The program will them commence the process of converting your file to a .mts (AVCHD) format and writing a folder structure to your destination location. NOTE during the process you will most likely have windows come up with AVSinfo.exe has stopped responding, I believe this is because it is trying to find images on the net corresponding to the DVD your are using to use as thumbnail images, I just clicked cancel on these errors and let the process continue.

Step 6. Everything going ok you should not have a folder somewhere like H:\AVCHD (H drive is my SDCard slot).

Step7. Create a directory on your SDCard called PRIVATE i.e. for me H:\PRIVATE

Step8. Copy the entire AVCHD folder that MultiAVCHD just created into H:\PRIVATE

Step 9. You should now have a folder on your SDCard like this H:\PRIVATE\AVCHD

Step 10. Go stick your SDCard in the RSES of your Highlander/Kluger and see if it reads properly and the option to select "VIDEO" is enabled and that it plays your video.

So if you've read to here I'm just going to re-iterate that I am still testing the process to get multiple video's to work on a single SD Card, that I am still testing .avi files. Also be aware that due to the restrictions in FAT32 format you wont be able to copy files any larger that 4GB over to your SDCard so this may severly limit what video's you can convert to AVCHD as converting to AVCHD does make your file bigger.

I will post more updates to this thread as I go, but hopefully this has helped a few people, so feel free to send me beer! remember I have 3 kids

Update : ok to solve some of the issues with MULTIAVCHD program go follow the steps outlined in the thread by the author found here

AVCHD / Blu-ray tools (by dean) • View topic - Latest download links

Hi,

I have downloaded this and attempted to follow your instructions. Only the first 8 seconds of the movie plays in the car. Can anyone offer any assistance? Thanks

 

[waqarkhan]

Hi Everyone from Australia,

My wife and I just bought a new 2014 Highlander Grande (well Kluger Grande down here in Australia) with the Rear Seat Entertainment system. Being and IT professional and an A/V techhead with three kids I was interested to see that it had the ability to play of an SD card.

After reading the manual and a lot of reading on the net, including reading threads started by other Toyota owners I couldn't find anywhere where someone had any luck getting it to work well.

SO long story short I spent the last 3 days scouring the internet for conversion programs and trial and error I'm happy to report I seem to have got my first video to work....YAY! I've just managed to do this like 10 mins ago and I will be trying methods to get multiple videos on the SD card to read and play so I will update this thread as I go, but for now here is an outline of what I did.

Basically I took a standard .mp4 video of around 130mb and through the process below converted it to AVCHD format on an SDHC (16GB) Card and played in in the RSES on the toyota.

Step 1. Make sure your card is correctly formatted, that means for most of us either FAT32 for cards 4gb-16gb or EXFAT for 16gb-32gb. This can be done easily in windows by putting your card into an SD Card reader or if your using a laptop like me the SD Card slot on your laptop.

Step 2. Go and download MULTIAVCHD v4.1 from this link
multiAVCHD 4.1.771 Free Download - VideoHelp
Now please be aware that only the TOP link ie "Visit developers Site" seems to work well and the version it downloads it not the latest release i.e. its not build 771. For some reason I couldnt find this build on the net, but when you start the program it will ask you if you want to update it, for some other reason this took a fair number of tries for it to finally update for me, not sure why.

Step 3. Run MULTIAVCHD and click "Add Video File" - Choose your mp4 video (Im still testing avi's)

Step 4. Set your Destination Path (down the bottom left) to be your SDCard Drive. This is not strictly necessary as you can set it to be a directory on your hard drive and then copy the AVCHD folder over later to your SDCard

Step5. and the click "Start" and choose Panasonic Blu Ray Player. The program will them commence the process of converting your file to a .mts (AVCHD) format and writing a folder structure to your destination location. NOTE during the process you will most likely have windows come up with AVSinfo.exe has stopped responding, I believe this is because it is trying to find images on the net corresponding to the DVD your are using to use as thumbnail images, I just clicked cancel on these errors and let the process continue.

Step 6. Everything going ok you should not have a folder somewhere like H:\AVCHD (H drive is my SDCard slot).

Step7. Create a directory on your SDCard called PRIVATE i.e. for me H:\PRIVATE

Step8. Copy the entire AVCHD folder that MultiAVCHD just created into H:\PRIVATE

Step 9. You should now have a folder on your SDCard like this H:\PRIVATE\AVCHD

Step 10. Go stick your SDCard in the RSES of your Highlander/Kluger and see if it reads properly and the option to select "VIDEO" is enabled and that it plays your video.

So if you've read to here I'm just going to re-iterate that I am still testing the process to get multiple video's to work on a single SD Card, that I am still testing .avi files. Also be aware that due to the restrictions in FAT32 format you wont be able to copy files any larger that 4GB over to your SDCard so this may severly limit what video's you can convert to AVCHD as converting to AVCHD does make your file bigger.

I will post more updates to this thread as I go, but hopefully this has helped a few people, so feel free to send me beer! remember I have 3 kids

Update : ok to solve some of the issues with MULTIAVCHD program go follow the steps outlined in the thread by the author found here

AVCHD / Blu-ray tools (by dean) • View topic - Latest download links

Hi David, Thank you for your valuable information however, i am using Macbook and unable to download provided link to transfer mp4 videos to AVCHD player. could you suggest any other solution link to follow to complete process in order to successfully make sd card work in Rear entertainment system ?