So there we are, It's my last night in Tokyo and I've definitely got that Case feeling. Standing at my hotel window with a jar of sake, face lit up by the flashing neon outside. Behind me, the room has a cold glow under the light from my computer screen. Unfortunately, the laptop doesn't contain the Dixie Flatline but it's close enough.

I never did find a Chiba chop shop...

Those who know me will know that I have - using the parlance of the modern kids - mad skillz when it comes to video encoding and transcoding. I'll happily admit to wasting far too many hours learning the finer points of ffmpeg, mencoder and vlc, combining them with all manner of shell scripts, web interfaces, cron jobs and the like to set up my own mediacentre, video RSS feeds and shared video chatrooms (currently in maintenance mode).

So imagine my combination of frustration ("it should just work") and elation ("ooh, a challenge") when I discovered that my shiny new Mylo is extremely temperamental when it comes to video. I had assumed PSP-friendly video would have been fine but it turns out I was wrong. Any slight variation in frame-rate, bitrate, frame-size, aspect ratio, codec or container and I'd get a lovely "Sorry, the Mylo doesn't support this format" error (but in Japanese).

Anyway. In case you're interested, here's a shell script:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i "$1" -y -threads 2 -map 0.0:0.0 -f mp4 -vcodec xvid -b 768 -aspect 4:3 -s 320x240 -r ntsc -g 300 -me epzs -qmin 3 -qmax 9 -acodec aac -ab 64 -ar 24000 -ac 2 -map 0.1:0.1 -benchmark "$1.MP4"

call this from the command-line with the path to the file you want converted and 10 minutes later, your Mylo-ready file will be sitting next to the original.

I'm really only posting this here because in about 6 months, I'll have forgotten all about this and, given my current luck with technology, all my computers and all their backups will have simultaneously formatted themselves.