You Only Make Calls On Your Phone? Sucker.
I grabbed all my recent pictures from my phone via bluetooth onto the Mac yesterday when I remembered I took a video too (Quicktime required). Cute no? Anyway, I downloaded the movie clip on the pBook too and noticed that it was assigned a .3gp extension. Suprisingly, it worked in Apple’s Quicktime movie player. That got me thinking. I searched online for a .3gp to .avi / .mpeg / .mov application and came across a lot of garbage that was prolly chocked full of spyware and ‘try it out for 15 mins then you’re screwed’ shareware rules. Meh.
Then I found Nokia’s Multimedia Converter 2.0. An set of installation instructions can be found here. The installation process is quite annoying and tedious, but I think it’s worth it. To gain access to the program, you have to register for their forums and check your email a couple times in a span of 5 mins. Like it said, it’s worth it. Here’s what it does:
Nokia Multimedia Converter 2.0 converts video files to a 128 kbps video bit stream, which is compatible with Nokia’s range of “smarter” mobiles .It is an application for converting different types of multimedia files ( AVI, WAW, MPEG, and MP3) into 3GPP/ AMR or 3GPP/ WR AMR. The 3GPP format video can be played on a PC via the Nokia PC Suite, or more likely, on your Nokia mobile phone: including the Nokia 6230, Nokia n-Gage, Nokia n-Gage QD, Nokia 3650, Nokia 6600, and Nokia 7610. The .3GP (or also known as 3GPP format), is part of the MP4 Video encoding standard that is the replacement for the older MPEG2 standard.
Standardized file formats make me happy. While you can’t throw on a copy of Naruto (It’s encoded differently) you can encode a couple of public movie clips that you find on the ‘net. I’ve had some dj videos of the infamous A-Trak from the Allies Turntablist Crew from the Serato Scratch Live Forums for a while and decided to encode them. All it took was a couple clicks of the mouse and I had myself two movies encoded for my phone. I held my breath and uploaded them via Bluetooth and see if they worked on the celly… w00p w00p! Even the sound is decent! I used the default options and have yet to play to get the best bang for my kilobyte.
If you have a .3gp compatable phone, the vid links are here and here. I’m not very savvy on the topic of video encoding in general, so if anyone had any suggestions to converting XVID or other encoding formats to .avi / .mov / .mpeg, leave a message and we’ll wax poetic on the geek tip. LOL. That was so lame.
Now I won’t feel bad that no one calls me! 
~Spec
