My war on AVI is going astonishingly well, thanks to a piece of software called ffmpeg and a few minutes spend writing batch files.

ffmpeg is a tool that I’m scarcely scratching the surface of what I COULD do with it. I look at the documentation and I can’t actually fathom why I’d want to do some of the things it has to offer, but the thing I DO need – take a file in formats a, b, c, or d and convert them to format z, which is a format that our AppleTV can handle, it does quickly, reliably, and generally without complaint.

When it DOES complain, however, the error messages can be a bit… obscure.

For the record:  “big_values too big, Buffer sizes too large” usually means that the mp3 audio track is corrupt in some fashion, and that I need to throw the file into VirtualDub – another fantastic tool – and re-encode the audio before passing it through ffmpeg again.

Which is OBVIOUS, I mean, it spells it right out right there.