tech-tag

Converting streaming video to the Ipod using Linux

August 14th, 2006

After I’ve gotten an Ipod Video I have the possibility of taking video with me when I go, but often this is hindered by the video only being available as a stream. Using Linux there is an easy 2-step way around this. The only requirements are that mplayer and ffmpeg is installed. Even though I have not tried it on anything but wmv’s, but I guess it is a very robust method (depending on the number of codecs’s installed).
Step 1: grabbing the video

Grab the video from the source: I’ve found mplayer’s command line does this very well.

• mplayer mms://source-file-address.wmv -dumpstream -dumpfile file-name.wmv

Step 2: Convert the file to an Ipod-friendly format

I read somewhere (and I can’t find it again) that mencoder was not appropriate because of some technicality concerning their header. One should therefore use ffmpeg when converting to the Ipod.

• ffmpeg -i file-name.wmv -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 2100 -b 200 -qmin 1 -qmax 3 -bufsize 8192 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 160 -ac 2 -s 320×240 file-name.mov

I find this commandl ine to work okay as long as the source is not in widescreen format (16:9), if it is the aspect will be wrong. Then you might want to try out this one.

• ffmpeg -i file-name.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000 -b 700 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192 -s 320×180 -aspect 16:9 file-name.mov

I found the last piece of command line at this here, which is a great source for further information on video to the Ipod.

Now the video should be ready for the Ipod, just sync it to the Ipod with your favourite tool for that.

On problem which often occurs is that the mms address is hard to get knowledge of. This can many times be retrieved by right clicking in a playback of stream, in firefox with the mplayer-plugin installed, and select “copy url”. A more complicated way is using ethereal network analyzer.

Even though this is a guide for Linux I would think that Windows this would work in Windows with cygwin and ffmpeg and mplayer installed.

One last question is about the legality in this - but that must be depending on the publisher on the stream and so on.

Entry Filed under: Ipod, Usb, Video, portable