Video encoding for Zen Vision W

Summary

• Problem: Get a movie from DVD into a Zen Vision W
• Solution (dense):
  • Decrypt the DVD,
  • encode to 480x272 MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid), MP3, into a .AVI-file,
  • put the file on the device with mtp-tools.

Detailed version

Add a package-repository which does include software that is not free to use everywhere (specifically you need libdvdcss and lame). In Sweden, where I live, users are not obliged to respect software patents claims.

There are different software packages that can be used to perform this task. Here I describe how to accomplish it with avidemux. An alternative that seems promising is ogmrip. With the specification given in the Summary above, it should be easy to solve the problem with ogmrip instead of avidemux.

Install the needed packages: mtp-tools vobcopy libdvdcss2 avidemux lame

apt-install mtp-tools vobcopy avidemux lame

1. Decrypt the content of the DVD by copying to VOB-files to harddisk

Note: simply copying the VOB-files using normal file-copy tools will lead to read-errors. The files must be decrypted, which is done by vobcopy.

Unfortunately, avidemux does not support reading from encrypted DVD:s, so you need to decrypt the content of the DVD, which is made by vobcopy Also, avidemux needs to be able to write a index of the mpeg-files and since a DVD is read-only, that would have been another problem, if the files were not copied to harddisk first. It would be nice to skip this step, e.g. by using fuse/dvdfs and symlinks, but the major distros does not seem to include binaries for dvdfs.

• Put the DVD in the DVD player.
• make the target directory the current directory of the terminal
• execute vobcopy

mkdir ~/my.temp
cd ~/my.temp
vobcopy

2. Reencode and resize the movie to a resolution no greater than 480x272 pixels

• Open the VOB file (it is in ~/my.temp) with the smallest number in the file name, e.g. My_movie1_1.VOB
• Choose "Yes" to the question "There is several mpeg file, append them?" Ignore the horrible grammar.
• Choose an audio track, by using the menu "Audio/Main track", and choose the first track, nr 0, unless you want something special.
• In the Video Menu, in the left panel of avidemux, choose MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid)
• In the Audio Menu, also to the left, choose MP3 (lame)
• In the File Menu, also to the left, choose AVI
• Under the Video section, there is a button Configure, choose that and type in 1000 as the Target bitrate (kb/s).
  • This is a possible area of improvements:
    • try a fixed quantizer instead of a fixed bitrate, should improve quality, at the price of a non-predictible target file size.
    • try a lower bitrate, if the file gets too big for your taste.
    • If quality is especially important (e.g. because the source has bad quality), use two-pass rather then one-pass.
• Press the button Filters, and click on "Mplayer resize" and press "+"
  • Check the "16 round up" box, and drag the slider to the left until
    • the x value is equal to or below 480 and
    • the y value is equal to or below 272.
  • Press OK.
• Click the Filters button in the Audio section, and choose mixer: "Stereo"
• Select the parts of the movie that you want to keep with the A and B marks (beware that extra materials must be manually excluded)
• Save the movie, with a filename that ends with ".avi" (this will start the encoding process)

3. Send the reencoded file to the Zen Vision W.

If you saved the movie under the name my_movie.avi, then use the following:

mtp-sendfile my_movie.avi Video

The filesystem mtpfs is nice in theory, but it failed - at least on my system, to save large files on the Zen Vision W.

Extras

To get subtitles, see here.

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Last modified: oktober 17, 2019