[Philip Purves]

I bought this unit also with similar aims in mind.
Forget other codecs. I tried everything to no avail. Is Kodak knowingly miss-selling this? I think so… especially if their own support cannot back up the stated claims on the box. More iritating are all the internet sites that make the same claims but have clearly never even tried the movie playback on the unit or probably (I suspect) never even laid hands on it. Everyone wants to make sales and shift product and they never bother to query the PR blurb.

Anyway (rant over) here is a workaround…
If you analyse the movie that comes with the device you will find it is a muxed mpeg1 with a .mpg extension. That is the only movie format (that I can find) that will work on the m820.
But it is very hard these days to get anything to output custom-sized .mpg movies … quicktime and compressor won’t. What to do? Help is at hand with a software company called imtoo (yes that is the correct spelling). For the Mac they make an app called Video Converter and it allows you to convert almost anything to anything, including, yes, to custom mpeg1 files with .mpg extensions. It works!
You have to play around with sizes and settings a bit, until you get what you want. I got some good results going straight form H264 movs to mpg.
Good Luck.