Scott Hanselman

This post will likely win the award this month for "least useful and most obscure use of two totally unrelated tools to do a task that few folks ever would need to do and fewer would be interested in reading about" but I wanted to save it for myself for reference.

I've got a bunch of old TV shows that are in MPEG2 format that were recorded with BeyondTV from SnapStream. I don't want to toss them, but they are fat and wasting space. I'd like to have them available if I wanted to watch them on my PlayStation Portable, but using PSPVideo9 is tedious for more than a few files. Also, the version of FFMPEG that comes with PSPVideo9 is really old.

You can get a binary copy of FFMPEG (as the project team releases source but not binaries) from this friendly fellow here.

FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. It includes libavcodec, a leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Windows. The project was started by Gerard Lantau, an alterego of Fabrice Bellard, and is now maintained by Michael Niedermayer. Notable is that most FFmpeg developers are part of either the MPlayer, xine or VideoLAN project as well. [Wikipedia]

FFmpeg doesn't like WMV files very much, and they are compressed pretty well already. I wanted to run this ffmpeg command line...

ffmpeg -i 'oldname.*' -f mp4 -r 25 -s 320×240 -b 768 -ar 44000 -ab 112 'newname.mp4'

...on all my files that weren't WMV and convert my files to MP4 video at 320x240 and a decent bit rate.

I used PowerShell to exclude this command line, build the filenames and ran this PowerShell command (pipeline) on my folder:

dir -exclude *.wmv | foreach-object { $newname = $_.Basename + ".mp4"; ffmpeg -i "$_" -f mp4 -r 25 -s 320×240 -b 768 -ar 44000 -ab 112 $newname }

Ran for a few hours and the PlayStation Portable is now happy with my copies of old TV shows that aren't on DVD yet.

NOTE: The System.IO.FileInfo object, returned from PowerShell's 'dir', doesn't have a "BaseName" property, so I've added a custom ScriptProperty to my "My.Types.ps1xml" file:

<Types>
   <Type>
     <Name>System.IO.FileInfo</Name>
      <Members>
         <ScriptProperty>
           <Name>Basename</Name>
           <GetScriptBlock>
            $this.Name.Remove($this.Name.Length - $this.Extension.Length);
           </GetScriptBlock>
         </ScriptProperty>
      </Members>
   </Type>
</Types>

As outlined in this post called "BaseName for FileInfo objects" on the PowerShell team blog.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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