Converting 720p to 480p (maybe even 480i) Need how-to procedure

[TheNomad63]

I know this or something similar must have been asked a million times but neither google nor this forum's search yielded anything usable for me.

I have been given on a USB stick, an old series first season episodes. I have a WD Standard def (no HiDef) media player black box. When I browse into this series' folder, it say it is not capable of playing this resolution files. The person who gave them to me said they must be 720p but he does not remember exactly either.

I use an ubuntu 10.x laptop and want to convert these files to 480p, with the hope that WD media player will be capable of handling this resolution. I do not have any GUI frontend apps installed for ffmpeg. I am not against installing something from the GPL repository, but if at all possible, I''d like to attempt this conversion from the command line.

Have never used ffmpeg but read about it a while back and I think this is the application I need. But I also need a dummy's version procedure regarding how to accomplish this.

If someone can help me with a command line or direct me to document, simple enough to understand for a video processing newbie, I'd be grateful

Thanks in advance

[davexnet]

Perhaps AVIDEMUX? I have it running just fine in PCLinuxOS.

Install Mediainfo to give you basic info abut the files. Put it into view/text mode and put the output
in here. More specific info will follow.