[jackerbes]

Just thought I'd let you know how this all played out.

I used the mencoder from your link (thanks again for that) and got that all set up as per the above. The only difference was that the MPlayer *.exe file is now named gmplayer.exe instead of mplayer.exe as in the tutorial.

So I ran a video clip through it and it converted a 36.8 MB clip to a 19.8 MB *.avi file. I transferred that to the x20 using iriver plus 3 and it played fine. The clip was not of the best quality but I saw the same things on the converted clip that I did on the original.

When I started iriver plus 3 to do the transfer, it spent quite a bit of time downloading and installing an update. When that finished, it reported the version as 3.4.2.5, up from the 3.3.something that it had been running. That sort of surprised me. I noticed that the About screen now credits the use of ffdshow, mencoder, and mplayer so I assume that results from my use of those to convert the video.

But then it went downhill from there. I started MeWig again later to convert some more clips and could not get it working again.

When I started MeWig it failed on the first attempt to convert. I then noticed that it appeared to have not saved all the configuration settings I had entered the first time I ran it as they were blank or missing.

I tried to re-enter the configuration details as per the tutorial above but was unable to. The problem is that the Audio Conversion settings on the Sound Settings tab are grayed out and cannot be entered and the Options for MP3 menus are different. It also does not report any available audio streams.

In checking all that I noted that I had spaces in the paths to gmplayer.exe and mencoder.exe and that it says those cannot be used. I re-installed all the files to a new folder off the root with no spaces in any of the paths but I'm still getting all the same issues.

I did another install on another machine (Windows 2000 Pro) and when I ran MeWig there and went to configure it, I had the same problems with the grayed out choices and other issues on the Sound Settings tab.

So I'm stalled again. And, quite frankly, sort of losing interest in converting videos for use on the x20.

Is there another software, commercial or shareware, that will do these kinds of conversions? I might be at the point where I want to try something different.

Thanks for any help,

Jack