Monthly Archives: August 2008

Converting BBC iPlayer video to DivX

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[ update 17th Oct 08: more details about this on the iPlayer page ]

The BBC iPlayer is great, but I want to watch TV on a TV, not on a computer. So here’s a short script to convert video from iPlayer to DivX with MP3 audio so that it plays on my Archos AV420.

First, download the video from BBC iPlayer using iplayer-dl. This gets the un-DRMed iPhone version of the video.

Then use ffmpeg to do a two-pass conversion.

ffmpeg –i inputfile.mov -vtag DIVX -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -aspect 4:3 -pass 1 -s 640×480 -b 1000k -acodec mp3 -ab 128000 -ar 48000 -ac 2 outputfile.avi

ffmpeg -i inputfile.mov -vtag DIVX -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -aspect 4:3 -pass 2 -s 640×480 -b 1000k -acodec mp3 -ab 128000 -ar 48000 -ac 2 outputfile.avi

Depending on what it’s playing on you might want to change the aspect ratio and resolution. My Archos is a bit strange about the aspect ratio it displays on the TV, so I force the aspect ratio to 4:3, which is then expanded to 16:9 by my TV.

The iPhone versions of the iPlayer videos are typically 480×272, so I am also doing a bit of upscaling here as well, which probably isn’t necessary. But the result was perfectly watchable on a 32” TV


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SmallDVD status

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There hasn’t been a new release of SmallDVD for quite a while. Several reasons for this, but the main one is that despite all the feature suggestions I’ve received (thanks for these), it basically already does everything I intended it to do.

SmallDVD was never meant to be a replacement for iDVD, or Toast, or ffmpegX. It’s intended to do one simple job – put MPEG files onto DVD with a simple menu. And it does that. So, there’s unlikely to be another release of it in the near future.

However, I have spent time recently on improving my video conversion scripts to process files to load into SmallDVD. While SmallDVD 0.8 does offer a bit of video conversion, there are no controls over bitrates, formats, etc, so you will almost certainly get better results from doing this conversion manually. Yes, it’s a bit more hassle, but it’s worth it.

So I have restructured this site to include a Scripts page which will have a variety of useful little scripts that make use of some of the tools that underpin SmallDVD.


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