{"id":24,"date":"2005-10-09T14:17:47","date_gmt":"2005-10-09T13:17:47","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-08-08T19:35:30","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T18:35:30","slug":"playing-movies-on-the-iaudio-x5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/?p=24","title":{"rendered":"Playing Movies on the iAudio X5"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am enraptured by my new Cowan iAudio X5<\/a>.
\nIt plays both flac and ogg vorbis and appears to my linux box as a
\nstandard USB storage device. Given this level of openness I’m willing
\nto forgive it for running some version of embedded windows.<\/p>\n

However until today I hadn’t got around to trying to get it to play
\nback any useful videos. It comes loaded with some short video clips
\nwhich are basically adverts for other Cowan products. However by
\ninterrogating these clips with mplayer I was able to glean the
\nfollowing information.<\/p>\n

VIDEO: [XVID] 160×108 24bpp 13.000 fps 189.4 kbps (23.1 kbyte\/s)
\nOpening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
\nAUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit\/8.33% (ratio: 16000->192000)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I’m no whizz with mencoder so I had to do some searching around until I found a good intro to using mencoder<\/a>. With that in hand I was able to put together an encoder command that worked.<\/p>\n

mencoder inputfile.avi -o outputfile.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=96 -ofps 13 -vf scale=160:108<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I added the lower bitrate for the audio as some sources suggest that
\nthis makes playback more stable. Theoretically the X5 will play back
\nvideo at 15fps but can get unhappy so sticking at 13 seems sensible.
\nNow I’m not sure that I’d want to watch Lord of the Rings at 160×108
\nbut character driven drama like House or The West Wing is remarkably
\nwatcheable at this resolution. I doubt I’ll use this feature day to day
\nbut if I was preparing for a long flight I might whack a couple of
\nseasons of my favourite TV shows onto the X5 to serve as an alternative
\nto the inevitabley dreadful in-flight movie.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am enraptured by my new Cowan iAudio X5. It plays both flac and ogg vorbis and appears to my linux box as a standard USB storage device. Given this level of openness I’m willing to forgive it for running some version of embedded windows. However until today I hadn’t got around to trying to … Continue reading Playing Movies on the iAudio X5<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}