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Well, not to much happened today overall, but I’ll catch you up on the little things. First, I called up Starbucks to see how the applications were moving along. They’re still going through the stack from Monday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that phone call. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll hear something. Next up, a client of mine who is an avid VW fan like myself informed me that there is a beautiful Audi A6 S-series at our local VW dealership. I drooled on the pictures for a bit. I was seriously considering until I saw it was automatic. After slapping myself back to reality I realized that for a much smaller cost I could mod the Jetta further and escape starting another car loan. I think I will keep with this plan. Every once in a while temptation springs up and I want to get a new car so bad. Luckily it usually turns out to be a passing thing. If all goes well with Starbucks hopefully I’ll be posting some Jetta mods in a few months. I have started brainstorming my plan of attack for this new business venture with James. I still have a lot of research to do and hopefully this weekend I’ll get some time to do a bit. On my wireless video syncing front I did further testing today. I tried a bunch of scripts that are currently available for converting video for viewing on the iPhone and iPod Videos. None were super advanced and resulted in either poor quality video or unplayable formats. I have decided to pursue writing my very own script to do the conversion processes using ffmpeg. This will be my first major shell script so I’m guessing it’ll take a few tries. I got part of the script squared away this evening when I came across a post describing how to parse out values from the command line. Credit goes to prowla for this line found here. Using prowla’s command as a basis I have come up with a line to get the values needed to calculate proper aspect ratios:

tcprobe -d 0 -i filename | grep “frame size” | sed ’s/^*-g //’ | awk ‘{print $1}’

This returns just the frame size of the video that you input. From there I will parse the height and width and perform the division to figure out the appropriate conversion size and to add the proper amount of padding to the top and bottom of the frame. I’m going to try and make a bit more progress on this tonight. Once this is complete and I can properly calculate the values I will write a basic ffmpeg command to convert a video. I have settled on using MPEG4 compression, or lack there of, for compressing my videos. I have not had a single successful conversion with H264 that was playable on the iPhone, until I figure out the B frame settings and all of that I will stick with the easy solution. Once the videos are converted I will write a script to SSH them into my phone each morning at 1AM or something around then. If I can accomplish this I will be only a stone throw away from having a fully wireless media flow with my iPhone.