OK, and at the very last step, it says

Now you can press the upload button (after choosing a port and/or putting the device into bootloader mode)

How do I put the device into bootloader mode?

From context and experimenting, I'm inferring that TinyCircuits-TinyTVs-Firmware-merge.ino is meant to be the main file, but the problem is that when I try to open it, it complains that it's not in a *folder* named TinyCircuits-TinyTVs-Firmware-merge -- and the folder that it's in, is named after the repo, which is named *very* similarly, but without the "-merge" on the end.   Am I understanding this right?  If so, should I put in a pull request that renames the file?

I got all the way to the last step of the guide before hitting something I don't understand:  the instructions say

Uncomment one of these lines in the main .ino file to select the hardware target: //#include "TinyTV2.h" //#include "TinyTVMini.h" //#include "TinyTVKit.h"

but I don't know which .ino file is the "main" one.

While I think of it, I might as well document that the other situation that sometimes stymies my ffmpeg conversions is trying to convert a video that completely *lacks* an audio track;  I fix it by first running something like this on the input file:

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ffmpeg -f lavfi -i anullsrc -i inputfile.mp4 -shortest -c:v copy -c:a aac outputfile.mp4

to add an audio track of silence, and then running the typical tinytv ffmpeg command on this previous command's result.

I was getting the blue "file is invalid" screen (or whatever it says, I forget exactly) on some converted videos.   I eventually narrowed it down to the source files being *not* chroma subsampled, which ffmpeg respects and carries over to the converted files unless you say otherwise;  non-420 video formats are fairly rare in standard video-playback contexts, but you'll run into it if you're rendering out something lossless to be compressed by a separate program, or something like a .PNG image sequence (or a .GIF) that you're asking ffmpeg to turn into a video.

The Arduino IDE is telling me there's updates for all three of the copied-in libraries (IRRemote, JPEGDEC, SdFat);  should I update them, or does it need precisely the version it came with?

Wonderful, thank you!  I'll give it a shot soon...

Assuming you've already installed ffmpeg:  if you've got an input file named IN.MP4, you would open the terminal in the folder that the video file is in, and then type

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ffmpeg -i "IN.MP4" -r 24 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=210:135:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=210:135:exact=1,hqdn3d" -b:v 1500k -maxrate 1500k -bufsize 64k -c:v mjpeg -acodec pcm_u8 -ar 10000 -ac 1 "OUT.AVI"

and you can change the bit after -vf according to the suggestions in the earlier post to get different results (like squashing the content, or having letterboxes).

Actually, here's one that I like:

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-vf "crop=1024:658:112:62,scale=210:135,hqdn3d"

The screen is so tiny that sometimes I like to focus in on just a specific portion of the frame, to make the subject as visible as possible.   This setting takes a 1024x658 region of the original video, that's 112 pixels over and 62 pixels down from the top left corner of the original video.  Obviously that's just the numbers that fit the last video that I did this way, and you'd replace them with whatever works best for the video you're converting, based on measuring a screenshot of the original video.

I'll also toss in here that you'll need a

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-pix_fmt yuv420p if the source video isn't in that format already.

I just checked the github and it seems like there's been an update, does that mean it's up to date now?   Is there anything in the way of a 'getting started' guide you could point me to, for someone who's never worked with arduinos before?

Faloun, this sounds like an unrelated issue to mine;  I suggest you start a separate thread.   In my case, the number is distinctly *not* changing unless the video changes as well; the correspondence between video and number never changes for me, the only issue is seeing static during a physical click of the wheel but NOT having the channel change in any way.

I'm interested in trying to add/fix features for the TinyTV2; I've found the source on your GitHub page, but I've never worked with Arduinos before, so I was hoping there might be some kind of 'getting started' guide?  I've found this guide for the original TinyTV, but I'm not sure how much of it would apply to the 2?

It seems to be getting worse; it happens probably more than half the time now, and typically takes three turns before the static results in a *different* channel rather than the same one...

I've loaded up some long videos onto my TinyTV2, and while they do "keep playing" while I'm on other channels as I'd expect, they always start from more-or-less the very beginning when I power the TV on.   I understand that saving position would be tricky, and keeping a clock running while it's off would waste the battery, but personally I'd be happy with the solution of it just starting playback from a random point in the video every time it's booted, so I'm not always seeing the same opening seconds of it every time I turn it on?   (I'm not sure what sources of entropy it would have to draw from to pick the random number, maybe the current battery level?)

OK, I just tried removing my custom videos, and I can confirm that it is definitely still happening.  (I got rid of several of the built-in ones, so it isn't COMPLETELY stock, but there's nothing on there that it didn't come with.)

I don't have the remote, no.

Is there any way I can debug what's coming from the encoder knob?