TinyTV 2 is a a cute device for playing video content. It comes preloaded with a handful of short clips. You can also easily load your own videos, movies, and TV shows using the TinyTV Converter – a free tool to convert any MP4 file.

The Converter is limited to processing one file at a time. I recently needed to convert a folder containing a couple hundred .MP4 videos to the .AVI format used by TinyTV. To accomplish this task, I used the open source tool FFmpeg to do a batch conversion.

The following example assumes you have already installed the FFmpeg command line tools. Here are the steps:

1. Open a terminal window and navigate to the folder where the images are located. Example:

cd source_images

2. Create a folder for the converted images:

mkdir output_images

3. Run this command to process images and place the converted files into the output_images folder:

for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -r 24 -vf "scale=210:135,hqdn3d" -b:v 1500k -maxrate 1500k -bufsize 64k -c:v mjpeg -acodec pcm_u8 -ar 10000 -ac 1 "converted/${f%.mp4}.avi"; done

See this forum post for alternate scale settings and further discussion.