TinyScreen MP4 Converter ?

[alexandersshen]

Howdy! Just got my kit this week and it's fantastic. Very cool stuff. I remember in the KS they talked about a converter for MP4s to the TSV filetype. Outside of a tutorial on getting animated gifs or pngs over to the format, is there an actual binary I can access to do the conversion?

From the KS Campaign: "Watch videos and movies on your Tiny Arcade.  Convert any MP4 movie using a free utility to the TinyScreen format, put them on a microSD card, plug in and watch your videos (with sound!)."

Would love to have some old arcade screen cap videos cycling through like the attract mode for Pac-Man or TMNT. Thanks!

[neoBigD]

I 2nd this! Got mine yesterday as well, awesome little guy!
But information on the kit/system is sparse still, probably till more people get them in their hands and create stuff.

[Ben Rose]

Glad you like the hardware, thank you! Yes- software is lagging while we are still shipping. We have an new Python script that depends on a gstreamer installation- if you happen to have a standard Linux distribution available, it's easy to use- otherwise it's tough to install the dependencies. We're working on this.

If you're interested in playing with it in its current state, I can clean up the code and post the current version in the next day or  two.

Thanks,
Ben

[WookieeFart]

If you're interested in playing with it in its current state, I can clean up the code and post the current version in the next day or  two.

Yes, please.  I have been trying with Handbrake.

Mahalo!

[jgeorge]

Please do post it when you can! Not afraid of Linux dependencies, I'd like to see how some video looks on it.

Thanks!

[Ben Rose]

Glad you guys want to try it- I didn't get to clean it up much, but it should 'just work' if you run it and type the input file as an argument. When I gave it a final test a minute ago, it gave a gstreamer error the first run, then worked correctly the second try.

Thanks,
Ben

[alexandersshen]

Please do post it when you can! Not afraid of Linux dependencies, I'd like to see how some video looks on it.

Thanks!

Have you had any luck with it? I run a Mac and I got stuck at some of the dependencies trying to run it (namely not finding "gi").

[Skywalker]

You say watch any movies with sound but how?  All I see is info on images and animated gifs.  And all the info on that page seems like another language to me.  The link for PIL(OS X) is broken.  Whatever that is.  I downloaded the color.tvs file and when viewing it on the tiny arcade it looks like there are 10 of them tiling across the screen.  How do I play my own little 17 sec video I want to see on it.  I even made the video 96x64 to fit the screen.  That didn't work.  I made a animated gif version of it the same size that doesn't work either.  I managed to find mp4 to ts converter online but that just created station the screen.  Been at this for 5 hours.  HELP!

[alexandersshen]

You say watch any movies with sound but how?  All I see is info on images and animated gifs.  And all the info on that page seems like another language to me.  The link for PIL(OS X) is broken.  Whatever that is.  I downloaded the color.tvs file and when viewing it on the tiny arcade it looks like there are 10 of them tiling across the screen.  How do I play my own little 17 sec video I want to see on it.  I even made the video 96x64 to fit the screen.  That didn't work.  I made a animated gif version of it the same size that doesn't work either.  I managed to find mp4 to ts converter online but that just created station the screen.  Been at this for 5 hours.  HELP!

Unfortunately the tutorials you see are strictly converting animated gifs over to a TSV file that also needs a proper .BIN file for the video player. They're still working on this apparently (there's a link to a python script in this thread above).

We'll likely have to wait until the Memento Kickstarter finishes (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modeplusplus/memento-by-mode) since they will have an online converter using the same TinyDuino screen.

[Ben Rose]

Hi Skywalker, sorry we don't have anything published yet. I think Ken helped you out through email.

Alexander, good catch on Memento- they were going to do the front end for the online converter, but it looks like that will not happen. We'll focus on trying to get our converter usable on Windows/OSX as soon as possible once hardware is delivered.

[mjculross]

Ben:

I'm very interested in getting video(s) to play on my TinyArcade.  I was able to run the posted python script under Ubuntu (actually, it's Ubuntu running as a VM in VirtualBox under Windows !!), starting with an AVI video file & the conversion completes successfully, no errors reported.  However, the video appears to have a real bad horizontal scroll (to test the conversion, I just rename the output to "Video Player.tvi" & place it in the "Video Player" folder . . . maybe this is also part of the problem ?!?).  Should I be using any particular command line options when doing the conversion (e.g. vfr=) or are the defaults sufficient ??

Thanks again for posting this utility !!

Mark J Culross
KD5RXT

Glad you guys want to try it- I didn't get to clean it up much, but it should 'just work' if you run it and type the input file as an argument. When I gave it a final test a minute ago, it gave a gstreamer error the first run, then worked correctly the second try.

Thanks,
Ben

[Dennis]

Ben:
  However, the video appears to have a real bad horizontal scroll (to test the conversion, I just rename the output to "Video Player.tvi" & place it in the "Video Player" folder . . . maybe this is also part of the problem ?!?).

That's exactly what I did too (renaming as "video player.tvs"), the preview videos doesn't excpet to have audio in them, so it just does not really look good ;-) .... just put your video file into the *root* of the sd card (not into any folder!) and it should work...