Having purchased my awesome Sony X-Series and begun getting it to work with Linux, I was eager to begin using the OLED display to its full potential. Namely, video and lots of it. Most portable devices support the WMV and MPEG codecs and the X-series is no exception (WMV with/without DRM and MPEG-4, plus H.264 to be precise). Most AVI files you might have won’t be compatible with the device which means you have to transcode: convert from one codec to another.

There are lots of solutions for transcoding on Linux. Some more simpler than others. The solution I found to work out of the box was Mark Pilgrim’s mencoder based solution. I successfully converted from AVI to WMV by just running the following commands in a shell/terminal:

sudo aptitude install lsdvd mplayer gpac zenity mencoder
sudo wget http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/06/podencoder.txt -O /usr/local/bin/podencoder
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podencoder
podencoder foo.avi


This worked 100% for me. I then just copied the file to the videos folder on my Walkman and it worked!

Yay.