So you bought one of these players just to find out that
- It supports just a subset of MPEG4 SP (strictly speaking it is NOT MPEG4 SP complaint).
- The bundled movie converter, while based on MPlayer and FFmpeg does not work on Linux.
Let alone the blatant GPL violation (friends at MPlayer/FFmpeg fame says a team of assassins was already dispatched iriver's way. Rumor has it includes members of the Project From Hell age -- you have been warned).
I thought about quickly drafting a better and cross plataform movie converter but then realized I should maybe give you a working encoding recipe first (not to mention I have a lot on my TODO already), so, here it is:
- Install MPlayer. If the one you installed has support for XviD in mencoder you are golden, otherwise you might have to build and install a custom one (If you use debian and maybe in ubuntu too, installing libxvidcore4-dev before building MPlayer from svn should be enough).
- Proceed to encode your video with this cmd line:
mencoder INFILE.SOMETHING -vf scale=320,expand=320:240 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr=128 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=600:max_bframes=0:vhq=4 -of avi -o OUTFILE.AVI
Of course you can customize this, specially the -vf part. I myself have to try other codecs yet.
Special thanks go to Robert Swain who helped figuring this
out yesterday. The dude has a lot of talent encoding with constrained/crippled neat gadgets as targets. Go read his blog and send him my regards.
Shame on you Iriver..., Shame on you.
