Encoding video for Archos Vision 14

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© 2008, Blender Foundation : CC BY 3.0
www.bigbuckbunny.org

The kids had taken a few videos which they wanted to put onto their Archos Vision 14 portable media players, but the supplied software is Windows-only and wouldn’t run successfully under Wine. The example movie on the device (Big Buck Bunny) had in its metadata a comment that it had been encoded with mencoder, so I thought there was a reasonable chance that Archos’s clunky-GUI’d software just called out to mencoder to do the actual work.

Running Archos’s AVIConverter on a real Windows XP machine and watching via Process Explorer revealed that this was the case. Grabbing the command-line and trying it under Linux worked:

mencoder -noodml \
  input-file.avi \
  -of avi -o output-file.avi \
  -ofps 15 \
  -vf-add scale=128:-3 -vf-add expand=128:128:-1:-1:1 \
  -ovc xvid \
  -xvidencopts bitrate=400:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:me_quality=0 \
  -srate 44100 \
  -stereo 0 \
  -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=128

No doubt this could be translated into an ffmpeg command-line by someone who knows what they’re doing.