How to play video on your TomTom navigation device

January 18, 2010 – 20:44

After my good old TomTom Go 700 passed away I got a new TomTom Go 740 Live and soon found out it’s really easy to play video on a TomTom navigation device. This way you can use your navigation as an in-car entertainment centre. With TomPlayer you are able to watch full screen video’s in AVI (divx or xvid) or MPEG video and listen to mp3 or ogg audio files.

The documentation on tomplayer.net can be a bit confusing and installation is not the same for all TomTom models. In this post I will explain how to install and configure TomPlayer on an external MicroSD memory card. This method will work for models Go 740/750/930 Live and will probably work for a lot of other models. At the end I will explain another configuration which might work for your model.

Installation

Insert SD-card into TomTom slot
Download the Tomplayer zip archive and extract it
Connect TomTom to PC and quit TomTom Home
Copy The Following folders to your external SD-card: audio, tomplayer, video
Rename the folder “SDKRegistry” to “SdkRegistry” and copy this folder to the root of your TomTom internal memory

I’ve read the different descriptions for installing on the internal memory and on an SD card, and I was still a little confused by the terminology… especially references to /mnt/movinand and to /mnt/sdcard.

It seems like:
1 – /mnt/movinand refers to the removable storage (i.e., SD-card)
2 – /mnt/sdcard refers to the internal memory.

On Windows PC, these show up as external drives H: and I: respectively. So when we modify the configuration files taking these assumptions into consideration, Tomplayer worked correctly.

Configuration

Open tomplayer.ini (the file is in tomplayer/conf/ folder)
Change:
video_dir = /mnt/sdcard/video
audio_dir = /mnt/sdcard/audio
to:
video_dir = /mnt/movinand/video
audio_dir = /mnt/movinand/audio
Open tomplayer.cap (the file is in SdkRegistry folder)
Change:
AppPath|/mnt/sdcard/tomplayer/|
to:
AppPath|/mnt/movinand/tomplayer/|
Disconnect your TomTom from PC and restart it

Now you will have a fourth screen in your TomTom main menu. Start TomPlayer by pressing the icon. On first start TomPlayer will start with screen calibration. Touch the crosses and proceed. Last thing to do is to copy some audio and video to their respective folders on the SD-card. Have fun!

An alternative method is to copy all files of the distrib folder to your external SD-card. The ttfilesytem (do not copy this to your TomTom internal memory!) will load your TomPlayer as soon as the SD-card is inserted and normal TomTom will load when it’s ejected. This didn’t work on my TomTom Go 740 Live, even worse it made it crash, but I have read this method should work on most TomTom models. You can also install TomPlayer to your TomTom internal memor. I did not do this because I don’t to run out my internal flash read/write cycles. If you have any problems installing or configuring TomPlayer visit the tomplayer.net forum for more help.

If you want to watch video on your TomTom convert your video’s to avi or mpeg. Try MediaCoder as it’s free and it has everything you need. TomTom screen resolutions are 480*272 for the widescreen models (TomTom XL or GO) and 320*240 for fullscreen models (TomTom ONE).