Last month I picked myself up an 8GB Insignia Pilot video MP3 player from Best Buy for Christmas.

I looked at a number of MP3 players before deciding on the Insignia Pilot. I had two main requirements: it had to work with Linux and it had to support Ogg Vorbis audio. The Insignia Pilot does both of these and more. It supports an impressive list of formats: MP3, WMA, WMA Lossless, WMA DRM, WMA Pro, OGG, WAV, Audible, MPEG4 (30 fps), WMV (30 fps) and JPEG.

The Insignia Pilot supports 320x240 MPEG4 video at 30 fps. Very nice. The installation CD includes a Windows based application that will convert video clips and images into a format compatible with the Pilot. This is great if you are running Windows, however, not so helpful if you are running Linux.

Over the next few days I learned more about video codecs and encoding than I had planned to. The Anything But iPod site was a great source of information and thanks in part to this initial thread on supported video formats , MPlayer and hours of reading the documentation for MEncoder and Xvid followed by trial and error I have a workable solution.

First copy the DVD (which you own) to your hard drive using the following,

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dump.vob

Next is the encoding process. The Pilot's screen is 320x240, however, if the DVD is in widescreen format and you want to preserve the ratio you need to scale the video to 320x176 instead.

mencoder dump.vob -aid 128 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=96 -srate 44100 -af resample=44100:0:0 -af volume=20 \ 
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=384 -sws 2 -vf scale=320:176,harddup \
-noskip -skiplimit 1 -ffourcc XVID -ofps 29.97 -o output.avi

With the above settings I can encode the Matrix to 481.1 MB. For me, these settings provide a reasonable trade off of size over quality. If one wants a slightly higher quality you can change the audio and video bitrates to cbr:br=128 and vbitrate=512 respectively.