AMV Encoding, Ubuntu

Just bought an MP4 player, although it’s not MP4, but AMV. Noone seems to have details on how to encode this format under linux. The software bundled includes “mencoder.exe”, running under wine, looking at the process reveals the command.

I gave this a go with mencoder native for linux, and it worked perfectly. I am well pleased about this. I will try and write a pygtk front-end to this and play with some of the settings, however for now I am going to document on the net the mencoder command that works:

mencoder -noodml [SOURCEFILE] -of avi -o [DESTNAME].avi -ofps 24 -vf-add scale=224:176 -vf-add expand=224:176:-1:-1:1 -srate 44100 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=550:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:me_quality=4 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=128

Update…

It seems that this is not AMV, but MPG4/AVI, although I think many people think they have an AMV player as I did. The chip is a “RockChip” player, branded as “Sumvision Sempra Pro”, so if you have this player or a similar device, then the above code should work. It seems to be very strict about the video formats, so it must be 24fps, 44100 sound, and 224×176 in size. The bitrates for audio and video can be changes tho..

Hope this helps people get content on

On a side note, I have worked out how to use Acidrip to rip DVDs direct to this size, which goes pretty well on a recent machine. I will blog about this later.