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Sat Nov  4 00:58:24 CET 2006

movies on my k750i phone

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When I got my new phone last summer, I saw that it was
possible to play movies on it. I was like 'cool', and promptly
forgot about it completely.

I dont know why, but the other day I suddenly remembered-
and I started to think about what format it demands. My phone
is a Sony-Ericsson k750i, and after a little googling I found
that my phone talks a mpeg4 format called 3gp.

After a little more googling, I got enough info to set up a
script which, given an avi/mpg/mov file, converts it into 3gp.

You'll need a patched version of ffmpeg, mplayer, and
mencoder to get this to work. It should work on any machine
which has a bash interpreter (linux, bsd, solaris or cygwin),
though I've only actually tested it on my linux boxen.

Incidentally, on my k750i there's no exponential
fast-forward...  which means that if you quit a movie after
twenty minutes you have to push the silly little joystick to
the right for a very long time before getting back to
where you were.

If your original movie was an mpg, you can chop it up into
a bunch of mini-movies, and convert them one by one, giving
them incremental filenames. This makes things a little
easier. I did it like this:

# If your movie is 500M big, you could split it into 10M sections:
split -b10m friends.mpg section_
for n in section_* ; do convert_to_3gp.sh -i $n -o ${n}.3gp ; done


At which point you can copy the files to your phone. Now
you can move forward quickly, though I have noticed that it
takes longer to load the media player in the phone if there
are many files in {phone mountpoint}/mssemc/Media\ files/video 

I know that avis aren't as friendly to splitting as
mpegs. Im not sure about quicktime movs, I dont have so many
of them.

Oh, and the script convert_to_3gp.sh is here: http://blahonga.yanson.org/scripts/convert_to_3gp.html. 

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