Some of my mobile phones have been able to record video clips in MPEG-4 format. Sadly some of these clips don’t play on the PlayStation 3 and those that do stutter terribly. I use ‘iplayer-dl‘ to download content from BBC iPlayer. Sadly the files are in a Quicktime container and are not playable on the PS3. In order to address both these issues I created a script which extracts the audio and video from an existing MPEG-4 or ISO Media Apple QuickTime container and repacks them in a new MPEG-4 container with optional splitting of the resulting MPEG-4 to maintain FAT32  compatibility. The new MPEG-4 files play back just fine on my PS3

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

Mp4-Repacker.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

Recently I’ve been trying to get the new BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux working on my Ubuntu workstation, it requires Adobe AIR 1.5 and Adobe Flash 10. Despite installing both on my Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit workstation the BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux installer crashes Firefox everytime I try to install it, so more research required. Still, I am running Thwirl just fine having install Adboe Air 1.5 as per the method method below

Installing Adobe AIR 1.5 on Ubuntu

If you’re interested in trying to get BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux installed the see my notes below.

Installing BBC iPlayer Desktop for Linux on Ubuntu