Finally got mencoder working with Fuze!

[ktf]

I'm now in some freaky state of mind because I'm so happy I finally got a mencoder vid (xvid+lamemp3) working with my fuze. I couldn't find anything but people asking for another encoder than SMC, so I guess I'm the first to get this working.

I copied the header from the with SMC encoded video-version of the same file, so its working, but not as neat as it should be. I've been watching a video for 10 minutes now, and the audio is quite in sync. Seeking is not working yet, but I hope to fix that soon.

I got this working by copying the headers from the SMC file to the mencoder file with a HEX-editor. Now I need to write a script that writes real headers, with seeking.

[CrowdAds]

[sansaguy]

keep it up!...I'd love to use something other than SMC.

[Dhraakellian]

A month later, what's the status of this?

[ktf]

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I still didn't got any further. I have no experience with binary scripting, and I don't have much time to learn. Beside that, I've found some interesting codec-like files with the Sansa Media Converter software, about which I asked something on the Mencoder mailinglists, but it seems that no one knows how to use them. Finally, the harddisk on which I did my experiments died, so I lost all my test files.

I hope I'll have some time for this in about a month or two, but I can't guarantee anything.

[Dhraakellian]

It looks like someone got it working and automated!

Shell script (bash)

Someone took the research used to make the above script made a Python version with a cross-platform Qt GUI and put it on Google Code.

Both versions use mencoder to do the encoding and then AVI-Mux to make it so that the Fuze will actually detect and play the files.

Unfortunately, AVI-Mux is Windows-only (the author(s) couldn't find a linux-native program to do the job), so Wine is needed to do conversions on Linux. Fortunately, however, AVI-Mux actually runs in Wine, unlike SMC.

As a bonus, even though the conversion requires Wine or Windows, it's still all F/OSS!

I can confirm that the shell script works on both Kubuntu 8.04 and OpenSUSE 11.1, assuming the needed codecs are installed. I have not (yet) tried the Python version.