Using gtk-recordMyDesktop, I recorded a screencast of how to convert and resize .avi video files to work with the Cowon D2 using Avidemux, a free video editor for Linux. Upon further review of the previous sentence, very little of what I wrote happen to be words, so perhaps I should explain.

I own a Cowon D2. It is very useful. I adore it. For the longest time after I got it, I had problems figuring out ways to get video working with it correctly. Something had been giving me problems.

It turns out that when playing files, the Cowon D2 can’t handle B-frames. You don’t have to worry about this when you use the bundled Windows software, but I’m running Linux 100% of the time now. What was I going to do?

I struggled to find some solutions. Iriverter works most of the time. It’s cross platform running Java so it works almost anywhere too. If you can’t use Iriverter, or if it gives you problems, try Avidemux.

Avidemux more robust. It lets you do a lot more things with a wide variety of formats. I only created a simple guide to get things working for the Cowon D2. Further tweaking, for example, might be needed for widescreen videos on a small screen (I scale video to 320×176 resolution to preserve the black bars) (use the check box and slider on the resize filter menu), or changing the audio is possible to shrink the size of videos even further. That’s your preference.

This screencast for anyone using the Cowon D2 that had no clue how to get video working correctly. I hope it helped!