The Cat’s Sandbox

So you got yourself a new cellphone with a touchscreen, gigs of storage and more processing power than the first Appolo mission ever had. Mp3’s are overrated. Watching your AMV’s and latest Bleach episode whilst Bunta Fujiwara is driving you home in his AE86 Sprinter Trueno is more your style…

Now there are a lot of ways to do this.. (for the laxy spoon fed version read on a bit) You can get yourself VirtualDub, resize the video, extract the audio, use besweet to encode the audio (don’t forget the lame plugin) Oh! command line too hard? Get Belight then! You’ll need Nero’s dll’s as well. Then get an MP4 muxer. (I perfer the IBM toolkit) then start on the video. You need the codecs…. Sod this.

For those technical guys that just want the cool info here it is:

	Older Phones	Newer Phones
Basic video	MPEG-4 Visual Simple, Level 0	MPEG-4 Visual Simple, Level 0
Video resolution	176×144 (QCIF)	176×144 (QCIF)
Frame rate (fps)	15	15
Bit rate (kbps)	64	64
Optimal video	XviD MPEG-4 Visual Simple, Modified Level 2	XviD MPEG-4 Visual Simple, Modified Level 3
Video resolution	176×144 (QCIF)	320×240 (QVGA)
Frame rate (fps)	20	25
Bit rate (kbps)	140	300
Basic audio	LC-AAC	LC-AAC
Channels	2	2
Sample rate (KHz)	44.1 / 48	44.1 / 48
Bit rate (kbps)	64	64
Optimal audio	Apple / Nero LC-AAC	Apple / Nero LC-AAC
Channels	2	2
Sample rate (KHz)	44.1 / 48	44.1 / 48
Bit rate (kbps)	96	96

If you’re unsure consult GSMarena on what your screen size and if it does support MP4 files.

You can always drop the framerate a but and push up the bitrate. It should give you better quality though fast action scenes will look choppy. If the audio tends to get out of sync drop both.

Now for the spoon fed lazy version…

Since were doing the lazy version get yourself MediaCoder (If you don’t have AVIs MKVs or any other files on PC and you want to grab it off your DVD’s go to Doom9 and get some guides and software there)

Although there is separate MediaCoder versions for Mobile, Ipod, PSP etc. I would probably recommend the full version even though the Mediacoder 3GP Edition (It just says 3GP Edition - it can actually do MP4 files) works just as well.

Load the file(s) you want to encode.

Hit the “Extension” button (It’s the one that looks like a PSP)

It will prompt you to reset values to Defaults. (Why not? Its the first time you’re doing this right?

Now select “Generic Mobile Phone” You should get something like this:

You’ll notice it looks easy from here on but the devil is in the detail. Lets change these values to something a bit more relevant first. You’ll see right away selecting “High Quality” puts the bitrate over 300. Well thats ok seeing as I can’t select select a framerate higher than 15 fps.

So I select High quality

I leave the format as is (MP4)

And I set my resolution to 320×240

Well now you can either keep that window open or close it. (I close mine as I have no more need of it)

In your main Window select “Options” “User Interface Mode” “Normal Mode

This looks a bit more beefed up.

On the right Choose “Nero Encoder”And change your audio bitrate to 64, any higher. Encodeing audio and video is all about compromise.

Now select the “Video” tab make sure its set to bitrate based and specify a value of 300.

The format should be “Xvid” and the container “MP4″

Make sure to select the “Format” button and and enable the “Optimize for cartoons” option. (It is anime afterall)

Ok you’re halfway there.

Now select the picture tab.

Change your framerate to 25 and select your Crop method.

You can play around here getting different results.

Crop to fit

Expand to fit

As you can see different cropping methods give different results. Its a trade off between utilizing the maximum screen area or seeing the whole picture. Though you can always use the unused screen area for subtitles. :p

Now set the output folder and hit the start button!

Thats it. All thats left to do is to copy it to your phone. For that matter add an entire series to the list and it will batch encode them all.

As I said when we started If this doesn’t work for you try dropping the framerate, resolution and bitrate to suit your phone.