Hello!

Today I did an effort and polished/released the version 0.2.0 of TinyAVI.

This is a set of two very easy to use Python scripts for Unix (one command-line and one GUI using PyGtk) which will convert any (well... most ) video files which are correctly handled by mplayer/mencoder on PCs to a format suitable for portable devices, including Nokia N8xx.

The GUI application can be set up to use multiple CPUs, in which case it will launch several conversion processes in parallel.

Screenshot:


I wrote TinyAVI for my 12-year daughter, so it is expected to be very easy to use.

The program can be downloaded from its BerliOS page:
https://developer.berlios.de/project...?group_id=9512

There are ready Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 packages; for other distributions you will have to either build a package yourselves, or download the .tar.bz2 file and run 'make install'.

Of course, you will need mplayer and mencoder both installed, otherwise the program will do nothing

The program will automatically detect the size of your video and will also exclude black borders from the output. Then the source video size will be fit to target device resolution, taking into account the source video aspect ratio. If the aspect ratio of the video and of the device screen is very different, it will stretch "a bit" the image so that it fits better on target device screen, leaving less black space. For example, if your source video has the 4:3 (1.25) aspect, and you choose N8x0 as target device (800/480 = 1.6666 screen aspect), the resulting video will use the 1.45 aspect. If it would stretch it to 1.6666, that would be very noticeable, but with 1.45 it's not too noticeable, but at the same time you can see more details.