Recently got a Nintendo DSi for my child and one of the first things she asked was for her music to be copied there.
Since the device does not read mp3 files, we had to get them converted to aac, despite the fact that they have to have the m4a extension.
ffmpeg does a great job for converting several file formats, so after some googling I got this one line to convert all the stuff in one folder:
for f in *.mp3; do echo $f ; ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec aac -ab 256k "${f%mp3}m4a" 2>/dev/null ; done
And it works like a charm 
I own a really cheap MEMUP Wizzle video player. It plays regular mp3 files, but it’s not simple to get videos to run on it.
This device uses a AVI video compression codec (sherpya mencoder-mingw) with some strange options (version 1.0, based Xvid 1.1 video with 20 fps and audio codec 0×0050 mpeg1 layer 2, 44100khz and sample rate 128kbs)
After some research, I found that you can convert your videos easily with, surprise surprise, mencoder !
This works perfectly under Linux and even on other OSs (so said, I did not test it).
Here is the command line to convert a video:
mencoder -noodml INPUT_FILE -of avi -o OUTPUT_FILE.avi -ofps 20 -vf-add scale=320:240 -vf-add expand=320:240:-1:-1:1 -srate 44100 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=600:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:me_quality=4 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=128
Replace INPUT_FILE and OUTPUT_FILE with the filenames you wish to convert from and to.
Some friends have been asking me if the iPad could eventually replace my custom made Linux multimedia car system.
I reckon that the screen is nice an all, but can the iPad …
- Take Skype phone calls
- Automatically pause live radio (not just mute) when a call comes in
- Update the twitter account @linuxcar with what ever it is doing
- Bring up my current location on Google maps
- Update my current location on the web
- Allow free WiFi in the car
- Allow any other web devices in the neighborhood to control the multimedia
- Allow for a remote system to use the web interface
… all at the same time? No? Well, there is your answer.
Now, an Android based system like this might do it…
Hey folks,
Is this still the best way to cancel *all* print job requests from a queue in Solaris?
cancel `lpstat <printer queue name>|awk ‘{print $1}’`
Sugestions welcome.
Just a quick note to let you know that I’m a proud Individual Member of the Linux Foundation since the 14th of March 2010. Somehow I just can’t stop bragging about this!