Video Syncing to Portable Devices

[Arwyn Hainsworth]

Hello everyone!

Well, this weekend I officially got 1 year older and my loving wife
bought me a sexy sleek black iRiver X20 portable audio/video player! I
plugged it into my Ubuntu Laptop and ... it worked! (Bet you though it
didn't and I was going to complain, at which point you could tell me
to shove off to the -users list! Well it did, so nah-nah!) A big thank
you to whoever got MTP devices mounting! I even got some music synced
via rhythmbox in a few minutes. Yey! ^_^

There was no problem video working either. At least nothing a bit of
scripting and mencoder could not solve. However it would be nice to
have a GUI video syncing program. In fact that is the reason I'm
writing this E-mail:

Does anyone know of a GUI Video Syncing program. Browse video by
meta-data, drag'n'drop to portable device, automatically re-encode.
That sort of thing. Anyone?

I tried google for one, but got nothing. Next step, this step, is
asking on a mailing-list full of knowledgeable (or at least
semi-knowledgeable) people. Is this an itch I have to scratch myself,
or has someone already done it for me? Maybe even half-scratch? Does
anyone want to scratch it for me? or maybe we could scratch together?

Now that the Question has been asked I have a little story some of you
might like:

My wife also bought herself a small player at the same time she got
mine. Different model and pink. She likes pink. Anyway, the thing is,
she runs XP and with XP comes WMP10 After plugging it in, fumbling
about for 10minutes, reading the manual a bit and fumbling for another
10 minutes she turns to me with a sad expression on her face.
"it's not working", she says.
"what do you mean?", I replied and walked over to her screen.
"see this playlist in WMP? It says the songs are on the player, but
when I take the player out it says there is no data!", and sure
enough, the player had 'NO DATA' in large, un-friendly letters
displayed on screen.
Well, I don't think you will have trouble guessing what I did next. I
took the player to plug it into my Ubuntu machine.
"No! Don't do that!", my wife cried out!
"Eh? Why not? I just want to make sure that the files are actually on
there, that's all.", I explained.
"But your machine is weird! It might brake it!"
"It's already broken isn't it?", and without waiting for an answer I
plugged it in. Up popped nautilus and sure enough, the audio files
where on there, but in wma format. 'Maybe it's because they are not in
MP3 format', I thought. Although unusual these days, some players do
not support wma, but considering that it required WMP to connect to it
was a slim chance. A chance none the less, so I copied over a mp3 and
unmounted. What do you know, it worked! So I gave her back the now
working player thinking it could only play mp3s.
"It's working?! Did you convert all my files to MP3s?", she asked.
"Eh? No I just copied one file over."
"Then how come they are all available?"
"They are?", and sure enough, all the wma files were also available in
the playlist. I let her play with her new toy for a bit before asking
the question that need to be asked: "Tell me again, who's computer was
it brakes things?".

---
This E-mail has not been checked for viruses. Any factual errors,
grammatical errors or spelling mistakes are therefore the fault of the
viruses that have not been checked for and reading this E-mail is at
your own risk!
Moral of the story: Ubuntu is bless with god-given Portable Audio
Player Healing powers and Windows Media Player eats their babies for
breakfast.

I bid you good day,
Arwyn (who, although officially 1 year older than he was a week ago,
still acts like a 10yr kid suffering from caffeine overdose).