Avidemux is a very good tool, but I fear it is reserved to people with some good knowledge on video formats and settings.
I tried to look for a "profile" system in this tool to predefine optimal parameters for the tablet, but didn't found it. Did I miss something?

Thanks for the link to Avidemux. I look forward to trying it.

To try and correct video/audio syncing I tried DivXMuxGUI but that didn't solve it. Whether or not Avidemux will do the job remains to be seen.

I don't believe that it is necessarily a straightforward muxing/demuxing issue which is why I use VirtualDubMod. This permits the realigning of the two streams, albeit after a bit of trial and error in guessing the milliseconds in the delay.

FWIW I find that MPlayer gets audio/video out of sync if the audio stream is retained as AC3. The workaround is to keep the sound as MP3.

Here is my avidemux procedure for conversion of a DVD for N800-OS2007(!). The result plays without framedrops, in very high quality, with 128 kbs mp3 stereo sound and approx. 75% CPU load - BOTH in mplayer and in the built-in media player. Do not worry about the number of settings - you can store them as default ("project") and/or make a batch.

1. Open avidemux 2.4, copy your DVD to disc.

2. Open one of the big VOBs via file dialog.

3. Avidemux asks whether it should index it (for time line / preview pane etc.), answer yes (the index will be written to disc, therefore the copy action in step 1).

4. Avidemux says that the VOB probably belongs to a larger set and asks whether it should read the complete set. Say yes if you want the whole DVD. You can append other video files as you want.

5. Indexing a whole DVD takes a minute per vob or so (the first time only, the index will be reused). Now you can scroll and preview through the whole video, instant access to every singel frame via time line. Holding up/downArrow-keys goes along the timeline with highspeed (i guess keyframes only), holding left/rightArrow with normal speed.

6. Use markers A and B to select scenes, then just edit/delete, cut, paste until you are pleased (of course, the original file remains untouched!) with your preview. Note that after setting a mark you should jump to the next keyframe with >> or << since cutting is done exactly there, but not between keyframes.

7. Press properties button to inspect audio and video properties of your source video.

8. Video setting: MPEG-4 ASP(XVid). Configure: Main[ Encoding type: Two pass average bitrate, Average bitrate: 800 (do your experiments with lower values and tell us :-)), all others unchecked], Motion&Misc[ Motion search precision: 5, VHQ mode: 4, chroma motion: yes, 4MV: no, HQ AC: no, I-frame interval-Min:1, Max: 250, Number of B-frames 0 (!!!), Qpel: no, GMC: no, BVHQ: nopixel aspect ratio 1/1], Quantization[ quant.type: H263 (MPEG works in mplayer, not sure about media player), Trellis quantization: yes, others: let default 2/31], Second pass[ let defaults].

9. Video setting. Filters: My DVD has video size 720x480 (as most of them?). Add filter "Resize" with width 360, height 240 and "lanczos3" method, press "ok" (not "apply"). For media player you need a size as factor of 16, therefore add filter "Add black borders" with 20 left and right.

10. Audio setting: MP2(TwoLAME). Configure: let defaults. Filters: none

11. Format: AVI

That's it. Start by pressing the "Save" button. If it crashes immediately, then install XVid from http://www.xvid.org/ . Maybe some of the parameters lead to even better compression, but I did not have time to isolate them all. Video bitrate, for instance, could probably lesser without any quality loss. Do not forget to set "Number of B-frames 0".

Media Converter is a great tool (thanks Urho Konttori !!!), but this is a lot better, in particular because of the editing feature.

gammer, thanks for putting this how-to together. I am very interested in the app.

My personal favourite is avi.NET but that is solely a Windows program and I am in the process of moving from Vista over to Ubuntu and I see that Avidemux has a specific Ubuntu version so this is perfect for me and just what I have been looking for.

My next DVD encoding will be done using the app with reference to your guide.

I just edited my how-to post. Avidemux needs to write an index for VOBs and therefore you have to copy the DVD to disk. Forgot to mention this. Yesterday I tried 800 kbps for the video rate and there was no visual difference in the result - changed my recommendation.

Just a note: avidemux is fully scriptable: http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/inde...pting_tutorial , see also http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/inde...itle=Main_Page . I'll make a script to automate DVD encoding.

Somebody can post here mencoder with the correct parameters command.
This could be useful for make a Nautilus Script on GNOME, right-clicking the video to convert. Also, for convert a set of files from a directory automagically.

On GNOME, it's trivial to set up a right-click "Send to tablet" which uses as a target the tablet mounted over the USB cable something like:

If someone has that working already, I'd be happy to put instructions on the tablet-encode webpage. Alternatively, I'm probably going to do it on my wife's laptop this weekend.

The "-g" option means you'll get a visual progress bar of the conversion.

abrilc, maybe this is also helpful:

http://maemo.org/community/wiki/VideoEncoding

ITT Wiki has a section for multimedia which could use some sprucing up:

http://internettablettalk.com/wiki/i...itle=Main_Page

Yet most of the encoding wisdom by the gurus lies probably deep in the discussion threads which may make info-mining slightly tedious.

In fact, I would like to appeal to the resident video gurus to flesh out the Wikis with tips on extracting the last bit of video performance and quality out of the Internet Tablets.

(meanwhile I'm gonna crawl back into my cozy cave and continue experimenting with mencoder, VCDs and a trillion possible parameters...)