Stanziliëri

After 2-and-a-half year I finally got myself a new phone to replace my trusty old Nokia N90. It's still a great phone, but the years have been hard on it and it starts to behave erroneously more and more. So I called Vodafone and asked for a renewal of my subscription. I could get the Nokia N96 for free with it, so why say no? It's the latest and greatest phone in the Nokia N-series. And damn... it's a killer phone! Absolutely awesome. The screen is brilliant. The movie mode, music mode, radio, GPS, everything... I love it. Best phone I've had so far. But maybe that's not fair to state, because I also have a Blackberry Bold, which has an even better screen, and is much better for emails, but which I've simply not really used for music and movies yet because it doesn't have the tremendous capacity the Nokia has. The Nokia has 16GB internal capacity, expandable with a (yet-to-be-released) 32GB memory card.

My first experience with the phone was immediately superb. The phone came up with a wizard to move over from your old phone. It sends some requests using bluetooth to the old phone, and starts transfering all the contacts, calendar items, photos, videos, music, and text messages.

So I transfered everything, including 2.5 years of text message archive (about 1000 messages) while on my way to work on the train. But afterwards I realised that I shouldn't hold on to the past so much so I wiped it all again :P

Anyway. I realised that a 2.8 inch screen might seem small at first, but is really quite allright for watching movies on. So I started to try and figure out how to put videos on it. Nokia provides a tool that allows you to convert movies into h.264 format. But there's a flaw in it. For some reason the phone is not capable of seeking through movies created with that tool. If you seek to another point, or just start it somewhere halfway, the screen will stay frozen at the last frame it had shown before the seek, and will only play the sound. Quite annoying. Especially when you're encoding an entire DVD. Those movies are like 1.5 hour or longer, so there's a big chance you want to do some seeking.

After some trial and error here's the procedure I figured out for doing a proper transfer of dvd to h.264 in Nokia N96 resolution (320x240):

I use DVD Decrypter to copy the videostream from the DVD. DVD Decrypter has no official release site anymore, but the latest version (3.5.4.0) can still be found out there on the web. For example from dvddecrypter.co.uk.

In DVD Decrypter it's important to go to the Tools -> Settings menu and then the IFO Mode tab. There you have to select "None" in the "File Splitting" drop down. For the rest it's really easy. You basically switch the app to "IFO" mode, click on the title (or chapters) you want, and then on the decrypt button. You'll get a nice big VOB file on your harddrive.

Then all you need is a converter that'll make h.264 out of it. I use ffmpeg for that. To be specific I downloaded a front end app that takes all the configurating away from me: Videora iPod Converter. It's aimed at converting for the iPod and iPhone, but just ignore that. It allows you to specify your own encoding profile. So I copied the settings from the iPhone 3G settings (h.264 video at 768kbps with aac 128kbit audio), but changed the resolution specifically to 320x240.

The ffmpeg command it then uses for encoding is as follows:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "InputVideo.vob" -f mp4 -title "Video Title" -timestamp "2008-12-07 02:39:06" -vcodec libx264 -level 21 -s 320x240 -b 768k -bt 768k -bufsize 4M -maxrate 4M -g 250 -coder 0 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -flags2 +mixed_refs -me_method umh -subq 6 -trellis 1 -refs 3 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ab 128k "OutputVideo.mp4"

Note the -g 250. That means it creates a keyframe every 250 frames, which helps great in getting the seeking to work properly.

Maybe it helps someone. I'm enjoying it anyway :-)