VTech InnoTab with Ubuntu Linux

My family will be going on a long car trip later this month.  So I bought an InnoTab that Smiley can use to watch his five-minute Thomas the Train avi files.  It seems to be the least expensive and most durable device for having a little kid watch movies in the car.

Thanks to two guys named Ron I have learned how to put versions of those movies on the InnoTab.

First, prepare the SD card.  If it has contents, erase them.  Make a folder named LLN (which is an acronym for Learning Lodge Navigator).  Inside make three subfolders named MOVIE, MUSIC, and PHOTO.

Now you can use your computer to transfer music and photos directly to the SD card in the appropriate subfolders.  But movies first need to be put into the proper format for the InnoTab to display.

Go to the Ubuntu Software Center to install WinFF, which is a graphical user interface for the standard Linux utility ffmpeg.  Start WinFF.  In the Edit menu create a Preset with the following attributes and save.  (The Name and Label can be anything you want.)

Preset Name: InnoTab
Preset Label: InnoTab Movie
Preset Command Line Parameters: -vf "scale=480:trunc(ow/a/2)*2" -vcodec mjpeg -b 1800k -r 15 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 20050 -ac 1
Output File Extension: avi
Category: AVI

At the bottom of the main WinFF window pick AVI, InnoTab Movie, and a different folder than the folder containing the original movie files.  Then use the Add button in WinFF to pick which movies to convert.  Click the Convert button and wait a while.

Now you can put the new files into that MOVIE subfolder of the SD card.  Ta da!