Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I continue to try to find ways to convert movies for my GameParkHoldings GP2X handheld media and game player (which, by the way also plays a pretty nice assortment of games). The GP2X has a pretty narrow list of formats it will play, but I’ve already been able to convert a lot of mpeg and avi files to GP2X-friendly, resized, avi files by using FFMpeg as I reported earlier.

I am a recent user of Democracy TV within Linux. It is basically a video feed aggregator and bittorrent downloader. It gives me access to a pretty decent variety of “channels” (movie feeds) including one for classic animation (Woody Woodpecker, Felix, WWII-era propaganda and entertainment) and one for iPod-ready classic movies. DemocracyTV is also a player, so you can watch your movies in it. It’s quite the “mashup.” It gives me access to legally downloadable old media, and that’s a joy to me.

Sadly, my classic movie and cartoon channels like to give me .MOV files. I get .AVIs (most of the time) from Public Domain Torrents and only need to reformat for my small screen and ensure that the format & tags please the finicky handset’s player. With DemocracyTV, so now I need the QuickTime movies converted to DivX/AVI files. I can’t get FFMPEG to do that for me, so I need a new free tool.

My new toy is MEncoder. MEncoder is the file converter for MPlayer, which is a pretty amazing media player program for Linux. I’ve heard a lot of opinions about the code and the capability, but it seems to play just about anything that you can call “media” for me, and I’ve recently come to understand how difficult a task that might be. I’ve not written a media player, but I appreciate how much variety there is in video encoding.

This evening I just had my first success, and I’m pretty excited about it. I converted an ipod-ready quicktime video to an avi/divx video and successfully played it on my gp2x. The command was

mencoder /holding/84297.mov -of avi -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o Felix-GooseThatLaidGoldenEgg.avi

The movie is an episode of Felix the Cat, The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg. It was chosen because it’s small and because my youngest loves those cartoons. Personally, I’m looking forward to converting over some “Private Snafu” videos, and some full-length movies.

The handheld was a comfort to me on a recent trip to South Carolina. On the way over, I watched the old sci-fi “The Phantom Planet”, and on the way back I watched the Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour classic “My Favorite Brunette”.

In honor of my new year’s resolution to always remain grateful: The whole idea of throwing a bunch of old classics (received for free!) onto a little SD card nearly the size of a postage stamp (costing nearly nothing), and watching it on (rechargable) battery power in a plane at 30K feet is a kick. Who would have envisioned this ten years ago? Or that the operating system in the device and in my laptop is free, with source code I am free to modify. Even having free tools and free documentation on a world wide web to allow me to transform videos is a modern miracle.

It really is a great time to be alive, because even these silly things are possible.