TABLET-ENCODE(1)

💖 TABLET-ENCODE 💖

okay bestie, so this is tablet-encode, a video converter for Nokia Internet Tablets, and it lives in the General Commands Manual section of the man pages (section 1, iykyk). she's a command-line girlie but she also has a whole GUI side hustle. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tablet-encode [options] input destination
tablet-encode [options] input [input2...] directory
tablet-encode [options] --list input [input2...]

three whole moods, pick your fighter 🫶

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -g, --gui — open up a graphical interface to tablet-encode, because sometimes clicking is the vibe 💅
• -q, --quiet — be vewwy vewwy quiet 🤫 (yes, that's literally what the man page says, we love a bit of whimsy)
• -p, --preset=PRESET — the preset you wanna use. throw --preset=list at it to see every single one, no gatekeeping 💖
• --hq — high quality encoding, and yes she will take longer. good things take time, periodt ✨
• -s, --sample=SECS — make a SECS-second sample encoding instead of the whole thing. Default: 30 ⏱️
• -i, --index — generate an avi file index
• -i, --index — include material from FILE

ok so before anyone comes for me: yes, -i, --index really does show up twice in the original man page, and both descriptions are different. i am not merging them, i am not "fixing" them, i am simply reporting the lore as it was written 💀 iconic behaviour honestly.

• -7, --770 — use a different FOURCC for better 770 compatibility 👑
• -o, --original-aspect — disables the cropping of the image that would otherwise make it fit the screen better
• -c, --copy-audio — copy the existing audio track, don't touch it, leave her alone 🙈
• -2, --two-pass — encode in two passes for better quality, double the effort double the slay 🔥
• -m, --mencoder=ARGn — pass ARGn straight to mencoder (and yes, you can do this multiple times, stack 'em up) 🧚
• -t, --subtitle=FILE — embed subtitles in the converted video, from the specified file, or <file>.srt 💜
• -e, --episodes — when it's auto-detecting a DVD track, rip all the episodes 🌈
• -l, --list — says that the arguments are a list of files to encode, and the output file is the input suffixed with the preset
• -h, --help — print this help, then exit. bye bestie 👋

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

there are a number of different ways of using tablet-encode, but the simplest one is giving her one existing movie (or a URL) plus the filename of the target:

tablet-encode input.avi output.avi
tablet-encode http://www.example.com/somefilm.mov output.avi
tablet-encode dvd://1 output.avi

that last one has shown MPlayer's support for DVDs, btw. tablet-encode will also auto-detect directories containing VIDEO_TS folders as DVDs, and if the title on the DVD is unspecified, the longest one gets used:

tablet-encode dvd: output.avi
tablet-encode /media/dvd/ output.avi

for TV series' DVDs, the --episodes option is the moment. this will rip all episodes on the DVD within 10% of the middle-longest track (i.e. the median):

tablet-encode --episodes dvd: /media/nokia-external/Video/

a number of presets are available. if none is specified, it defaults to "average". you can see the full list of presets by passing list to the --preset option:

tablet-encode --preset list

if the target of the encoding is a directory, multiple input files can be specified:

tablet-encode file1.avi file2.mov file3.wmv  output/

there are many more options, and a full listing is provided in the online help:

tablet-encode --help

running tablet-encode with no parameters will start a GUI version, if possible. a GUI progress bar can be shown when specifying arguments with the --gui option. this requires the Gtk2-Perl bindings to be installed, so like, make sure you have those 🫶

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🦋 CONFIGURING 🦋

the file .tablet-encode.conf will be read from your home directory at start up. in this file you can define your own presets, change the default preset used if none is specified, and a few other things. it's giving customization, it's giving control 💖

to define your own preset, say "dvd", create ~/.tablet-encode.conf in your favourite editor and add the content:

$PRESET{dvd} = { abitrate => 256, vbitrate => 800, width => 400 };

this will define a preset called 'dvd' with an audio bitrate of 256kbps, a video bitrate of 800kbps and a maximum width of 400 pixels. the height is auto-calculated based on the tablet's screen and the size of the input video — she does the math for you, main character energy ✨

to use the 'dvd' preset instead of 'average' when no preset is specified, add the following line to ~/.tablet-encode.conf:

$defaultPreset = 'dvd';

heads up bestie: note that this is a mini-Perl script, so blank lines and lines starting # will be ignored. and all statements MUST end in a semi-colon, ;. no cap, if you forget the semicolon she will simply not vibe with you 😭

for Nokia 770 users, you may wish to always use 770-compatibility mode. to achieve this, in ~/.tablet-encode.conf put:

$options{770} = 1;

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

tablet-encode was written by Andrew Flegg <andrew@bleb.org>. 💜

this manual page was written by Alessio Treglia <quadrispro@ubuntu.com>, for the Ubuntu project (and may be used by others).

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and that's the whole page, fr fr 🎀 this one's dated December 15, 2009, from the TABLET-ENCODE(1) corner of the General Commands Manual — go forth and convert, bestie, you've got this 🦋✨💖