This small tutorial will show you how to transcode your videos and movies to be suitable for viewing on an mpeg4-capable cellphone.For this tutorial we are using MediaCoder, which provides many options, although it is not as easy to use as SUPER or QuickTime PRO. A few facts first:
1. If your phone does not support MPEG4/AAC and only supports 3GP (cheaper or really-low-res cellphones only support 3GP), then just use the SUPER application. For this tutorial we are not using SUPER because for its MP4 option it does not provide suitable resolutions for cellphones (although it does for 3GP).
2. If you already own QuickTime PRO, you can use that to export to MPEG4-BASIC, but unfortunately, the current QuickTime has an annoying bug that the resulted video has a small visible “twitch” every few seconds on small video MP4 resolutions.
3. VLC’s transcoding process is utterly buggy. The thing just doesn’t seem to work no matter what.
Because of the above reasons, we are going with MediaCoder. I am sure there are many other solutions out there, like the PSPVideo9, but they are not as easy to use or as flexible or as… free. Now, the MediaCoder application comes with a plugin (from the menu: Devices/Plugins/MobilePhone) that automates the cellphone-exporting process, but unfortunately that plugin is only suitable on Nokia S60 v2 phones that use the non-standard 176×208 resolution. If that’s the type of cellphone you use, then simply use that plugin to export your videos, otherwise, follow the tutorial below.
First, install MediaCoder, drag’n’drop into it the movie/video you want to transcode, and then select an Output folder from the “Output” tab (I usually output them on my Desktop). Then, from the Devices menu select Plugins/MobilePhone and then just immediately close that window. There will be two popup windows asking you two questions, answer affirmatively on both of them!
Then, go to the Audio and Nero tabs and select everything as is in the screenshot below:
Then, set the Muxer tab to “MP4Box”. Afterwards, move to the Video tab and do as it is below. However, here you have 2 options:
1. If your phone is a 176×220 phone, use 160kbps bitrate.
2. If your phone has higher resolution that 176×220, use 192 kbps bitrate if the screen is smaller than 2.4″ and 256kbps if the screen is bigger than that.
Then, move to the Picture tab and select everything as below if your phone has 176×220 resolution. Use the 320×240 resolution only if your phone’s screen is over 2.4″ (e.g. touchscreen based phones, Nokia E61/E62). The “expand to fit” option is important, because it creates the letterbox effect for widescreen movies, and this is needed for some phones (e.g. some LG phones will only work with exact 128×96 and 176×144 resolutions and nothing else).
Then, hit the “start” icon from the toolbar, and wait for the transcoding to take place. Depending how fast your CPU is, or how long the movie is, it can take from 30 minutes to 2 hours to transcode a full movie. Then, move it over to your cellphone and have fun!
In the common case of 176×144/160kbps/56kbps-AAC, you will need about 190-200 MBs of storage for a 2 hour movie. Of course, using the h.264 codec instead of the MPEG4-BASIC it would result in about 100 MBs of storage needed for 1 movie, but unfortunately, no normal cellphone as of yet supports h.264 (only the iPods do, PDA phones with TCPMP installed and the SONY PSP after a plugin installation).
Please note that the Nokia 5300 won’t work well with the videos generated with this application, it has A/V sync problems (the bug is in Nokia’s side).
Below is a transcoded sample that we used to test our tutorial and clip. It is the trailer of the upcoming movie, “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer“. Let us know how well it works (or doesn’t) in your phone model. Of course, you will need an MP4-capable cellphone to test it out (as we said above, older/cheaper cellphones only support 3GP).
You really love cellphones, don’t you Eugenia?
I love gadgets in general, yes.
She’s in fellow company.
If you really want to watch movies on tiny screens, then go right ahead.
I’ll stick with larger screens.
Well, if you have nothing else to do on the ferry boat, or plane or bus, why not? Besides, I have a 2.8″ QVGA smartphone, which is pretty large compared to feature phones.
I prefer a good book.
Doesn’t anyone read anymore ?
Read? I tried to fill up a form last Friday when I went to the bank and I couldn’t hold the pen and write legibly! I forgot how to use conventional means to communicate.
Agreed mike, reading is what I do on my train/subway ride to and from work, one book after the other
Eugenia, tried the file and looks good on the Nokia 5300, only the sound is out of sync.
Out of sync sound, heh? Weird… Looks like a bug on the phone more than an encoding bug (except if the encoder actually uses VBR by default and the Series 40 don’t support VBR well).
I have re-encoded and re-uploaded the mp4 file, this time using CBR instead of VBR. If you had out of sync A/V, it should work now. Let me know please.
No and yes.
Reading seems to be a dying activity with the newer generations (I’m 19 btw)… But a lot of older people still read
I work at a smallish library and we do 1-1500 book checks out a month. Not bad I guess.
I have movies on my cellphone, but I always have about 5 books in in the process of reading in my car.
I hope you don't read while you drive.
umm… no?
Only at red lights!
You sir are a muppet.
My phone is carried everywhere. My big screen is not.
I can whip out my phone and watch a film when I am anywhere. I cannot do that with a big screen.
If I go into work, I can watch a movie, without anyone else noticing.
You, have your big screen……..
I encoded a few movies for my SE K800i (320×200) this summer. (I have an 1GB M2). It was really cool, but the screen isn’t very big, so I think I prefer watching movies on my MacBook when I travel.
Indeed, the K800i, liky my Linux ROKR E2, only have a 2.0″ screen, which is really small. However, any thing beyond 2.2″ is pretty comfortable.
BTW, exactly because your screen is too small, you might want to re-encode your movies to 176×144 instead at 192 kbps. You won’t see any difference in quality, as the pixel size is really small — and it will save you space.
Yes, I hade Shrek 2 in a lower resolution and it’s ok quality, a total of about 40MB. But I like the crisp with full resolution :o)
Die Hard 2 took about 350MB. But I used Super to create 3GP movies, maybe I should try MPEG4. These days I play with my new Mac, so maybe later. I haven’t had a Mac since I was 11 years old…
Try with the settings I suggested (192 kbps if you have a qvga screen) and you will see it will be good quality.
Thank you! Have a great day!
Could someone come up with a Linux version?
There are a few here: http://www.gnomefiles.org/subcategory.php?sub_cat_id=91 but I can’t comment on how good/bad they are. There are command line utilities that do the job as well as MediaCoder does, but for a good GUI, you might have to search a bit and might have to do compromises.
For the Mac, there is the ffmpeg-gui project and Handbreak and a few more too.
There are a couple of good tools.
The best is Lin3gp, then there is 3gpwiz.
Both work with whatever decoders you have installed, and the quality is very good on my SLVR at 177×144 if the video rate is 50 and frame rate is 25. makes the files about 50mb.
I’m going to wait until my cellphone battery lasts long enough for Gone With The Wind.
Nice tutorial, though.
I don’t think that cellphones will ever offer better battery life. What I mean, is that there are cellphones that have short battery life (e.g. Samsung P300) and there are cellphones that have very long battery life (e.g. SE W810i and Nokia E61). It all depends how big/capacious is the battery the manufacturer puts in the handset, and that usually depends if the phone is supposed to be a business device etc. And when a new battery technology arrives, manufacturers will make sure they use a really small battery in order to make the phone smaller, resulting at similar battery lives as we get today.
In other words, if you want to play movies on your phone, simply get a phone that has a good battery life. I would normally recommend to get the W810i, but it has a small screen, 2.0″. So try to get a phone that is known to have a pretty goood battery life and has a 2.2″ screen at least.
Motorola seems to have learned that lesson. My C975 battery would be flat in 36 hours if not charged, but they sold a high-capacity battery which lasted for around 6 days.
My SLVR L7 battery that was standard with the phone goes for around 17 days between charges….. or for 6 complete films.
“but unfortunately, no normal cellphone as of yet supports h.264 (only the iPods do, PDA phones with TCPMP installed and the SONY PSP after a plugin installation)”
Doesn’t the Nokia N73 support it?
http://forum.nokia.com/devices/N73
I have a friend who has an N73, I can ask him. If the N73 does support it, is among the first devices that do.
N73 (or included RealPlayer) supports AMR-NB, AMR-WB, AAC, RealAudio, RealVideo, H.263, MPEG-4.
http://www.nokia.fi/puhelimet/puhelinmallit/n73/tarkka_tuoteseloste…
Edited 2007-01-18 11:54
I just use Mencoder under Linux to convert movies/music videos, but then again, I use SmartMovie on my phone so I can just encode to mp3/xvid. A good gui for encoding stuff under Linux would be nice, and I think even I could do the programming, but I just never get myself to actually do anything useful :O
EDIT: Just thought to mention I noticed that there does exist a third-party h.264 decoder for S60 phones: http://www.arm.com/community/display_product.php?ProductId=2409&dis…
Though given it’s limitations in picture size and framerate, I’ll just stick to xvid
Edited 2007-01-18 11:59
Killer app for these things.
handbrake.m0k.org
I have tried it for my Sony Ericson M600 and the movies works flawlessly when played.
Eugenia, I just wanted to say thank you for an excellent article and pointing out MediaCoder as an option! I’ve been looking for a way to get some of my DVDs on to my Siemens SX-66 without having to encode twice and hopefully this will be the answer.
Pete sends…<eom>
i have an e61 and quicktime pro. but when i ripped a video the quality wasn’t very good on my phone. i just picked mpeg-4 improved and set the resolution to 320×240 but it looks grainy. any tips?
Download this QVGA clip on your E61 and tell me if you are happy how it looks like, and if yes I will reply with how to do it exactly with QuickTime PRO.
http://www.osnews.com/img/16983/f3.mp4
it looks good to me. however, the video i tried to encode was full screen not wide, so maybe that had something to do with it. i’ll try the instructions anyway and see what happens. thanks.
Ok, check this screenshot to see how exactly to setup your QuickTime Pro to encode your videos with a good average of quality-size:
http://www.osnews.com/img/16983/qt.png
320kbps is good for a 4:3 movie encoding (like the one you try to convert) and I would advocate that 290kbps is good for 16:9 videos (like the one in my screenshot above), while 256kbps is enough for super-widescreen movies (like the ‘Fantastic Four’ trailer in the article).
Just make sure that everything else is as in the screenshot. Both the video and the audio screens are setup as shown.
I’ve found using quicktime you must set video bitrate to 400-500 depending on the file with mp4 improved in order to get non-blocky video. I usually use 96kbit aac + 500kbit video @ 320×240 in mp4 format and the results look good on my E61.
I’m a bit disappointed though, I can’t find any easy way to convert DVDs on macs (handbrake is old/outdated, forget it…) If there was some way to rip a DVD into a single mpeg2 file (not conversion, just ripping but instead of into a bunch of VOBs, into one mpeg2 file) and then use quicktime pro to convert that, I’d be happy. Much easier than the mess I have to go through now with Windows/MeGUI/thousands of tools/etc.
That said, I did find for now at least – the quality is better to use the divx codec in quicktime pro to encode and the divx player to playback. I hate realplayer anyways, so it doesn’t bother me.
I wish there was a good h.264 player for my E61 – that’s my preferred codec.
Edited 2007-01-19 20:32
I just bought an LG Fusic. Tried the demo video from the tutorial and it works great. I tried to encode my own video (original video is a 4:3 ratio XviD encoded avi) and when I loaded the video onto my phone, the audio worked fine, but the phone did not show any video. Any ideas? I followed the tutorial exactly.
Phones don’t support .avi files. You should follow my tutorial *exactly* to make it work on your phone.
I did follow it exactly…I was saying the “original” file was an AVI. The file I loaded on my phone was a MP4 file.
you obviously did something wrong then… If the tutorial video worked and yours didn’t, an option was not selected right.
Could there be any difference between a video with a 4:3 ratio and a video with a 16:9 ratio (I believe your example was 16:9)? I am almost positive that I followed the tutorial exactly. What version of MediaCoder did you use in your example?
BTW…Thanks for putting the tutorial together and answering questions.
Edited 2007-01-24 21:49
No, there is no difference, because we always use the “letterbox” effect as shown in the tutorial. I used the latest stable version of mediacoder:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mediacoder/MediaCoder-0.5.1-r9.e…
BTW, email me or IM me to get this problem solved as I won’t be reading this forum for too long.