Sony Video Walkman: Cracked in 4 days!

Can you believe it? I finally encoded some video to play flawlessly on the Sony Walkman NWZ-S61 series!

But oh god, what a torturous route. In the end, I finally figured out that the version of FFMPEG I had was at fault. Upgrading to the latest development version through SVN fixed the problems.

Here is the command necessary to encode video onto the Sony Walkman, when you have a recent FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i input -b 567k -s 320x240 -vcodec mpeg4 -ab 220k -ar 44100 -acodec libfaac output.mp4

This is the command necessary to configure the new ffmpeg:

./configure --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-liba52 --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid

(you need development libraries for each of the --enable-lib* items there -  liba52-dev, libfaac-dev, etc. All are available in the Ubuntu Feisty repos.

If, when running FFMPEG, you encounter an error message about "try compiling with gcc 4.2, ignore it. Trying to fiddle around will only result in breaking your ability to compile! :-)

My ambition is to release a GUI video converting tool before Sony, and then add features to it later. I will be assisted by the use of a new monitor, that I will be buying tomorrow (as my old CRT has been giving me the sheets, flickering and turning white and stuff like that).

But yeah, it's now time for me to encode a video onto my Sony Walkman!