This small tutorial will show you how to transcode your videos and movies to be suitable for viewing on an mpeg4-capable cellphone.
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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.
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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........
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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 176x144 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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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
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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
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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&...
Though given it's limitations in picture size and framerate, I'll just stick to xvid
Edited 2007-01-18 11:59
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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>
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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
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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.
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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 @ 320x240 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
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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.
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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