Guysoft's Weblog

TEDding from the car – gPodder video Plugin for Rockbox April 7, 2011

TEDing from the car

Hey all,
After a few weeks of bouncing emails with Thomas Perl I am happy to announce that we have a working plugin for his wonderful podcast application called gPodder. With this plugin installed, any mp4 video podcast that is downloaded with gPodder is automatically converted to a format playable by rockbox MPEG player plugin. Effectively meaning seamless sync of video podcasts to any rockbox enabled device. I am specifically using the Sansa fuze player, but just changing the screen resolution at the top of the plugin should make it work with any other rockbox device, and with the right screen size. The final product for me of all this technical stuff is that I can listen to TED lectures in the car. Or using the verb was coined by my friend Uzair “TEDding” from my car.

How to Install

• First you should have gPodder installed (available also as “apt-get install gpodder” or any other distribution install equivalent).
• Second you will need these packages installed too:

   apt-get install python-kaa-metadata  ffmpeg python-dbus

• Now all that is left is to copy this script to

  mkdir -p ~/.config/gpodder/hooks/
  cp rockbox_mp4_convert.py ~/.config/gpodder/hooks/

• If your are using a different player from the Sansa Fuse, modify the first lines to your screen resolution:

  DEFAULT_DEVICE_WIDTH = 224.0
  DEFAULT_DEVICE_HEIGHT = 176.0

  make sure to include the .0 at the end.

• Thats it! Now each time video is download, for example from the TEDTalks Video Podcast it would be converted on arrival, and relinked as the file to be synced.

As usual, I would love to hear feedback from users and suggestions.

(more…)