More of a brain dump for me again. I keep losing these settings, so it’s handy to have them on my site.

The command below will turn a normal avi into one that can be played on a Creative Zen. It should also work for other mp3 player like ipod etc., that need video at 320×240. I use Mplayer under cygwin when I’m stuck on a windows machine (in work). It’ll work the same from a dos shell on windows, or from a terminal on *nix.

mencoder.exe <input file> -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell \
-vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts \
fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o <output file>

And in bash niceness do a whole dir and dump the output into the ./Zen dir (you’ll have to make it first)…

for i in *.avi ; do mencoder.exe $i -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trel -vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o ./Zen/$i ; done

If for some reason the index didn’t save with the file, the below will generate it, and save it into a new file. This can also be used to repair regular .avi’s with no index (One’s that won’t let you skip through them).

mencoder.exe -idx <input file> -ovc copy -oac copy -o <output file>

Update:

Was testing this under *nix today. If you are on a SMP machine, this will use two threads. Increase the number if you have quad core, etc.

mencoder.exe <input file> -ovc lavc -lavcopts threads=2 \vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell \
-vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts \
fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o <output file>