high on solder

I have been running the Rockbox firmware on my Sansa e280 for almost a year now and I like it a lot. Recently I was finally able to get the video playback feature to work and the following is a brief summary of how I accomplished this.

The Rockbox MPEG Player Plugin page describes how to use the cross platform program WinFF to encode files not only for the Sansa but also some of the other players that Rockbox supports. It warns, however, that depending on your Linux distribution the version of FFMPEG installed may not support MP3 audio and that you have to compile your own version that does support MP3 in order for WinFF to function properly. This can be an enormous pain to do. Luckily there is a much easier way to get around this. The FFMPEG Wiki has a repository listing for an alternate version of FFMPEG with MP3 support already built-in.

After adding this listing to my APT repository I installed FFMPEG and WinFF and have been successfully converting files to play on my Sansa ever since. WinFF is a nice little program. It has preset encoding settings for use with Rockbox and the Sansa (presets are also included for other players) as well as support for batch conversions, so you can tell it to convert several videos and come back later when they're done.

Update on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 10:15AM by Joe

The version of FFMPEG in the Ubuntu 8.10 repository now natively contains MP3 support.