Rob A has what appear to be better settings than mine for using ffmpeg to output 8830 compatible files. He is obviously using Windows, but under Linux, the same commands work, you just need to use $1 instead of %1 in the script (and put #!/bin/bash as the first line…) Looks like I may have tried to get too fancy to start.

For ‘normal’ size videos:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i $1 -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 400k -r 24 -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 -acodec aac -ar 22050 -ac 2 -ab 48k $1.mp4

For ‘widescreen’ videos:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i $1 -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 400k -r 24 -s 320x180 -aspect 16:9 -acodec aac -ar 22050 -ac 2 -ab 48k $1.mp4


Either one will accept a filename as input, and spit out an mp4 version.

To rip from a dvd to a blackberry compatible format I did ran the following command

HandBrakeCLI -i /Volumes/ARRESTED_D1/VIDEO_TS/ -t 1-5 -e ffmpeg -b 400 -w 320 -l 176 -f mp4 -o ~/Desktop/AD101.mp4

The options I used are these

-i input device or folder containing

-t titles to encode (on my arrested development dvd titles 1-5 contain 1 episode.

-e use the ffmpeg encoder

-b bitrate I haven’t tested what the max was but 500 gave a pretty good output for my screen. I couldn’t see any artifacts.

-w output video width

-l output video height

-f use the mp4 container format

-o output file

On Linux, there is only a command line interface version of the software, not a gui version. It doesn’t appear to support reading from media files (avi, mpg, etc) only from a dvd or dvd image. As a result, it takes a long time to make a change and test it.

If you’re interested in a tool for ripping dvd’s to a suitable form, I recommend Handbrake. I use it on my macbook for dvd ripping. It allows profiles to be set up for sizes, containers, encoders etc. So set up a profile for the bb and then rip away!

Happy New Year to you as well!

As far as the music, I’d say that, yes, it is good. I probably didn’t mention it, because it worked so well that I really didn’t think about it a lot. It is a strange thing to omit when talking about a musical, isn’t it?

If a CD had been available, I’d definitely have bought it, not having one available was another of my gripes.

Didn’t know you saw that show… The musical composer of this show is one of my fave, A.R. Rahman, a very famous indian Bollywood composer. Unfortunately, you don’t mention anything about the music. Was it good?

Happy New Year 2007 to you and Jen!!

Steven

I discovered lightbox at about the same time as you and I’m using it in almost all my web image applications now. I never realized the issue if the filename isn’t valid. I’ll be checking that out too.