How to encode video for RealPlayer from a linux platform.
Combined things I found on forums with what the man pages told me, hopefully this saves you time 😊
OK, so you found out that the synchronisation between sound and video using the Divx Player is terrible.
RealPlayer is better, but will not play most files. Now what?
Here's what I found using OpenSuSE 10.2 + Packman (64-bit)
To try out what you can do, copy (keep it legal) a chapter or two from a DVD with mplayer;
mplayer -dvd-device /dev/hdd dvd://1 -chapter 2-3 -dumpstream -dumpfile test01.vob
replace /dev/hdd with whatever your DVD drive is. Once you get it working, you can remove the chapter options to get the whole movie, or use it to split a long movie in two, the N95 took forever to accept a 370 MB file.Make sure you have plenty diskspace, movies are big.
mplayer/mencoder can encode, but did not give me playable files, so I tried ffmpeg;
ffmpeg -i test01.vob -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 350000 -s qvga -acodec libfaac -ar 48000 -ab 128000 -ac 2 test01.mp4 -map 0.0:0.0 -map 0.2:0.1
You can leave out the -map options when stream 0.1 is stereo or DTS, it was used here to avoid using Dolby Digital, that only resulted in unusable sound.
Another tip to take small steps; use ffmpeg with the -an option (no sound) to see if you can get the video running. Realplayer will tell you it doesn't play, but not why, so you need to do some elimination sometimes.😎
Feel free to play around with bitrates for audio and video, the above worked with very good quality, but you may want smaller files.
For transferring files in linux, set the N95 USB setting to Data Transfer and Do not ask. (then plug it in, Einstein)
This process takes two steps, so if anybody finds a way to encode properly with mencoder or rip DVD's with ffmpeg, let me know.