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AlBlue’s Blog

Macs, Modularity and More

Ripping media for Lexus 400h SEL

2009 Howto

The documentation of how/what to find (in terms of ripping media) for getting video onto a Lexus multimedia system (like in our 400h) is non-existent. Furthermore, the UI is an abomination and is more Lidl than Lexus. If you've managed to save yourself from buying the SEL and/or multimedia kit that comes from Lexus, congratulations – if you haven't yet, then please save yourself the bother and buy something else.

Anyway, we've got this now and so I wanted to put some media onto a USB stick (since the kids keep losing the DVDs, and most have got these naff menu systems) but needless to say, no-one at Lexus had a clue as to what I could put in the USB stick. Eventually, I managed to get it to work, by using a FAT-formatted USB stick and HandBrake to convert the media. I needed to set the output format to AVI (and end the filename with .avi, as otherwise it didn't show) as well as use the MPEG-4 (XviD) codec. I used an average bitrate of 1000kbps which looked reasonable on the small screen - the audio was set to MP3 128kbps using the LAME encoder.

Unfortunately, there is an overlay which shows a countdown of how far you are into the current track, which I've not managed to disable yet; if I ever figure out where the manual is then I'll update the post.