mediautils

tablet-encode

As the Nokia Internet Tablets have relatively slow processors, and relatively little storage space it is a good idea to "transcode" your videos to a smaller, more suitable format for watching them.

Nokia's Internet Tablet Video Converter is by far the best GUI video converter for this task, however only runs on Windows. It is also sometimes useful to be able to convert videos on the command line. It is, of course, possible to use mencoder directly to get appropriately formatted videos, but making sure the output will work, without testing it, is a laborious process and involves remembering fairly long-winded command lines.

Features

tablet-encode can help with all these problems:

• It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix and Windows.
• It guarantees the output to be playable on a Nokia Internet Tablet using a system of "profiles".
• It can rip and encode DVDs in a single step (dependent on mencoder version).
• It has a simple GUI interface for easily converting videos.
• It has a command-line interface so it can be easily scripted to interface to your PVR (for example, MythTV, Freevo or VDR).
• Presets allow tradeoff between space/quality to be decided on a per-video basis.
• Can optimise video size for the Internet Tablet's 15:9 screen.
• Handles anamorphic video sources such as widescreen DVDs.
• Output works with either the built-in Media Player, or mplayer.
• GUI and command line modes

Screenshots

The screenshots below are of the GUI version, obviously...

Getting mencoder

tablet-encode depends on mencoder from MPlayer. If you don't have it already installed (try typing mencoder on its own on a command line), you can find it in the following places:

• MPlayer download
• Google

Follow the installation instructions in the download. Once installed you should be able to type mencoder at a command line and see that it is installed properly.

Usage

tablet-encode
tablet-encode --help
tablet-encode --preset list
tablet-encode input.avi output.avi
tablet-encode --list file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi
tablet-encode --preset best input.avi output.avi
tablet-encode dvd: film.avi
tablet-encode --preset best dvd://1 dvd://2 dvd://3 media/
tablet-encode --gui input.avi output.avi

Download

More information, including comments ratings and downloads can be found on maemo.org downloads. Earlier releases can still be found on garage.maemo.org. The tarball is about 14KB.

• Home
• tablet-encode
• mediaserv
• Download
• Garage page

© Andrew Flegg 2007. Released under the Artistic Licence.