Video Playback on iRiver

From GrinningMonkey

Encoding can be troublesome on Linux. Here's my end results:

This 'ffmpeg' command seems to work well:

ffmpeg -i <inputfile> -vcodec mpeg2video -s 224x128 -qscale 6 -r 24 -ab 192k -ac 2 -ar 44100 <output>.mpg

I had some troubles using just one encoder (ffmpeg, mencoder, transcode) alone. To resolve the issues I use this to create an intermediate file:

mplayer dvd://<title> -dvd-device <directory> -dumpstream

Issues

I wanted to find a way to do encode from a DVD to a final file with just one command.

With ffmpeg I couldn't find a way to reference the title I wanted from the DVD. The closest I could find involved using a VOB file as the input source. That gave me trouble (a file that has errors about 22 mintues in).

With mencoder I could reference the DVD title well, but I couldn't get it to encode into an MPEG container format that Rockbox liked. I tried the suggested MEncoder options from Rockbox's webpage with no luck.

I tried doing an intermediate using mencoder with '-ovc copy -oac copy' but that ended up having too much data. It had the whole show (44min) plus part of itself repeated (total: 1 hour) and was 142MB instead of 104MB.

Thus the intermediate 'mplayer' command above.

Stats

Firefly disc 4, 3rd episode, "Lost in Space" is 44 minutes long. The intermediate stream.dump file is 1.9GB and the final file is 104MB.

Perhaps useful

while ( ! mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/mnt ) ; do sleep 1 ; done ; cp <videofile> /mnt/mnt/Videos; sync; umount /dev/sdb1

For information about resolutions and the Rockbox MPEG player in general, visit this site: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginMpegplayer