AirStash: Wireless Flash Drive + Media Server

AirStash stores your movies, music, photos, and documents and wirelessly shares them with your phone, media player, netbook, tablet, computer, and more. Use AirStash like a USB flash drive to drag & drop the files you want to your SD card while charging the built-in lithium polymer battery, then unplug & play on all of your browser-enabled WiFi devices*.

If you know how to use a USB drive and a web browser, you know how to use AirStash. Once you own AirStash, every other USB flash drive will seem less evolved. (continues)

Encoding DVD's for the Digital Blue 664 Disney Mix Max Personal Tinkerbell Media Player (White)

Our neighbor recently bought a digital player for their 4-year old daughter and they wanted me to help them put a movie they have on her player for an upcoming trip.

1. Rip the DVD - I used RipIt since I've been having good luck with that application recently. I used to use MacTheRipper, but a number of recently released DVD's don't rip well with MTR.
2. Transcode the VOB's - I'm using Handbrake to make a near-DVD quality MP4 video file: H.264 encoder, original framerate, 2500 kbps, two-pass encoding w/ turbo first pass, AAC audio@48khz, 128 kbps, no subtitles (since they'll get burned on the final video), loose anamorphic output
3. Flip4Mac Studio Pro HD - this is a must using Mac OS 10.5.x, I tried ffmpegX, Handbrake, and VisualHub with no success: export using WMV 9 Standard, one pass (I wouldn't waste the time on two pass since the final image is too small to notice a difference) CBR, 384 kbits/sec, 220x124, 30 fps, from the advanced button: profile must be simple, audio must also be one pass CBR, 128 kbps, 48 khz, stereo, I ended up saving a custom profile in case I ever need to do this again
4. You can find instructions on the web to use Windows Media Encoder if you're using that OS, but it looked like a pain in the butt to get it to work. Good luck there.
5. Save to the Mix Max via USB - the final file weighted in at 319.2 MB

The player works well enough and the movie plays fine, but the image is really small at 220 px wide! Other than that, this was the quickest way to handle the movie.