A couple of months ago, I bought myself a nice new cellphone. It has a good camera, and a fine display. It's neither too big nor too small. It plays video and audio well. That's a good thing, since I'm a video-on-the-phone kinda guy. Especially music videos. I'm also an Ubuntu guy - to the bones. And I needed a program that could convert my music videos into a format my cellphone would accept.
My Nokia 6120 only plays mp4 and 3gp videos, so, my goal was set: find a Linux tool capable of converting my music videos from a wide range of formats to something my cellphone could play without glitches. After a quick search, I found a few tools that promised this, but they were all too hard to figure out. A friend of mine tried as well, but gave up very quickly. But not I! After a long and difficult search, I found what I was looking for: an easy to install, easy to use application, capable of converting my videos to formats compatible with my Nokia. Actually, what I had found was much more than just that.
I had found MP4TOOLS. It is capable of converting AAC audio and AVI/MPG video to formats compatible with the PSP, iPod, and Symbian. It has it all, and with a graphical interface to boot. The install process is easy.
In your Ubuntu System menu, go to Administration > Software Sources. Go to the third party software section, and add the two following repositories:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/teknoraver/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/teknoraver/ubuntu hardy main
Now reload your apt-get list:
sudo apt-get update and you're ready to install. Run the command: sudo apt-get install mp4tools
That is pretty much it. Now you have a set of tools for converting all your videos to nice quality, good looking, mobile videos - the easy way! The list of commands available to you are:
mk3gp encodes a standard 3gp file mks60 encodes a high quality 3gp file (may not play on older phones) mkamr encodes an AMR file (ringtone) mkmp4 encodes a highest quality H.264 Video file, for PC playback mkipod encodes a movie for the Apple iPod mkpsp encodes a movie for the Sony PSP dvd23gp rips a DVD to a standard 3gp file dvd2s60 rips a DVD to a high quality 3gp file dvd2psp rips a DVD to a movie for the Sony PSP dvd2ipod rips a DVD to a movie for the Apple iPod
To convert any video (compatible with mp4tools) to your preferred format, simply use one of the commands listed above, with the full path to your video file. For example, to convert videofile.avi to a standard 3gp file, use the command:
mk3gp path/to/videofile.avi
This will convert your videofile.avi to, in this case, a 3GP file ready for viewing on most mobile phones.
