[James] has done some work reverse engineering the protocols for the iSee360i peripheral. This iPod addon is a media player housing that features a 3.6″ screen. It can be used to play video on iPods that don’t otherwise have the capability because it just uses them as a hard drive. He picked up the device at a discount chain for $15 and wanted to load his own videos directly from Linux without using the Windows-based software that comes with it. There’s the gotcha; even if you encode a video exactly the same as the device’s example video, it will be deleted the next time you fire up the iSee.

After some trial and error [James] reverse engineered all of the quirky requirements to load video manually. There are strict, case sensitive file naming conventions, every file must have a perfectly formatted thumbnail image, and an index file entry must be made for the video. He’s done the hard work of hammering out the details, now it should be easy to write a Python script to automatically format and copy your pre-encoded videos for use.