Putting videos to your phone

Phone screens are getting bigger and better all the time. This gives the users the opportunity to watch their favourite videos or TV series wherever whenever. For encouraging the users to do this, Nokia atleast have included some movies or trailers to their smartphones. Nokia N96 had Transformers, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic had Dark Knight's trailer and if I remember correctly Nokia N95 had Spider Man 3.

Sony on the other hand has taken little different approach and they are selling UMD movies that can be used in Sony PSP. Personally I don't understand this kind of approach because why should I buy another copy of my favourite movie which I have on DVD (or on Blu-Ray)?

Unfortunatelly putting videos to your phone is not too straight-forward because you need to convert the desired video so that it has the right resolution, good enough bitrate for video and sound and good enough frame rate. The better quality you want, the longer converting usually takes and the bigger output file gets.

Nokia offers a tool for this called Nokia Video Converter that is bundled to PC Suite and Ovi Suite. Unfortunatelly the program has still some flaws. I tried to use it for few times but it crashed and when it didn't crash, my Nokia N96 didn't have any video - only sound.

Luckily there are other (free) converting tools for Windows like Super, HandBrake, MediaCoder and Vio. I thought to test all of these, just to get some experiences and to see do they work similarly and are there big difference in converting speed.

My test environment were Windows Vista Home Premium with 2 GB of memory and a 17 minute avi-file with DVD quality. The file size was 121 MB, frame width 800 and frame height 450.

Basically every software converted the desired file in almost same time (7-9 minutes), and with same output size (56 MB). For some reason files converted using HandBrake and MediaCoder refused to work in N96. I didn't investigate the reason, probably some wrong setting caused this because MediaCoder used to work with different file some time ago.

Vio offered broad list of settings for different phones, but it lacked N96. Overall this is really important because settings are something than clear. Vio suggested 128 bitrate for N95, which seemed to be ok also in N96 but 400 that I used with Super was much better. With Vio's settings, the whole process was extremely fast, it only took 2 minutes and the output file was only 20 MB.

It seems that the most important thing in converting is to use pre-loaded settings. After this converting is easy and it can take some time and it is worth it. In future your trips will go much faster by watching interesting movies or series.

Inspired on discussions in Jaiku I'll try out soon a VGA quality video in my N96, then I could watch it from hotel's tv when I'm travelling. After all, N96 came with a S-Video cable.