Fri, 18 Apr 2008

Making iPod video work on an eeePC

Since the eeePC has no CD/DVD drive, and I wanted to watch some DVDs I bought here, a friend helpfully encoded them for me on his MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, he chose the h264 video codec since his settings default to encoding for an iPod type device. This works very well on an iPod, but I got audio only output on the eeePC. Fortunately, mplayer has decent debugging (as does smplayer, which provides a menu to view the logs of mplayer) so I had a good idea about what the problem was. Mplayer on the eeePC does not come with the h264 video codec.

Digging about on some forums led me to the suggestion that I would need to pull an alternate version of mplayer to get the codec. Here, in brief, is exactly what I did, which now enables me to watch h264 encoded video without having to install Ubuntu on the eeePC.

Open a terminal, using Ctrl + Alt + [T]
Su to root, using sudo su - and enter your password.
Add, using vim or your chosen editor, the following line to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib
Save the sources.list file and in the terminal, run aptitude update
Once the update completes, run aptitude install mplayer=1.0~rc1-12etch2, which should install the Debian version of mplayer, which includes h264 support.
You should now remove, or comment out the deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib line from your sources.list file, to ensure that no other updates are accidentally pulled from the Debian repository. Many may not work on the Xandros distribution on your eeePC, and may cause it to break in unspeakable ways. You have been warned!
h264 should now work for you - though I highly recommend running /usr/share/mplayer/scripts/binary_codecs.sh install which will install another ~10MB of various useful codecs for mplayer.
Exit your root terminal session - root is not a plaything and you should not be using it for your normal day-to-day activities :)

Note: I have tested this on an 8GB eeePC, running the original Xandros distro that it came with, but this information is provided as is and at your own risk. While this works fine on my machine, there is no guarantee that this is or will be the case with any other current or future model of eeePC. You may find it difficult / impossible to get support for your eeePC software if you upgrade in this way, so do so at your own risk - and take a backup of all your important data beforehand.
posted at: 15:23 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry