Convert Video for Viewing on the HTC G1/Magic Android phone.
The Google Android OS is the best mobile Operating System I’ve used, and the HTC G1/Magic phones are really excellent machines. They become even more excellent when you can take films and TV shows with you on your morning/evening commute. The train ride will never be the same again.
I’ve had to look up quite a bit to find the right and easy way to convert videos for the phone, and ended up collecting all the information I found into a neat and handy Bash script. I assume this could work for any other phone using the 3GPP / H263 video decoder/codec/type, but I haven’t tested it (you’re welcome to try it out and let me know).
Please remember that I’ve done this for myself mainly, so it assumes you’re using a Debian based distro for the setup portion of the script. If you don’t have apt, you’ll have to do the leg work and get all the pre-equisites sorted out yourself.
The script has two main parts: Setup and Conversion. The conversion is pretty straight forward. To convert 3 files you simple do:
./androvideo videofile1 videofile2 videofile3
However, converting to the phone requires the h263 decode/encode libs and ffmpeg to be compiled against them. When you perform the Setup portion (via ./androvideo -s) the script will attempt to do all for you. Attempt is the key word here. NO promises it will work for you (it does for me, but I’m special 
).
During setup, what is supposed to happen is:
- Get all build dependencies for ffmpeg via apt.
- Get a few libs ffmpeg will need, subversion, checkinstall and build-essentials
- Downloads the amr shared libs from and attempt to compile/install
- Get latest ffmpeg from svn and attempts to compile/install with the amr libs included
- Get rid of temp dir, all downloaded files and compiled pre-install stuff
Download the script (right click and Save Link As)
You’ll have to “chmod +x androvideo” after you download it to make it executable
I could not have done this without the very good help from these resources:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-mobile-81/androidg1-and-video-converted-via-ffmpeg-h263-687163/
http://po-ru.com/diary/up-to-date-ffmpeg-on-ubuntu-hardy/
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/amr
June 8th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Thanks, this app is awesome! I was just about to compile ffmpeg myself and muck about when i struck this handy script.
Thank you very much!
June 9th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Hi,
neat script, thanks for that. You should add “checkinstall” to your list of packages apt should get, since it’s not part of build-essentials and might not be installed everywhere (it wasn’t for me).
Other than that, good stuff.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Hi Daniel,
checkinstall is in the apt list already… I wonder why it didn’t work for you…
June 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
For Ubuntu Jaunty users, the apt-get install fails because liblame-dev is now called libmp3lame-dev
June 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I’ve updated the apt-get install and replaced liblame-dev with libmp3lame-dev. So anyone with Ubuntu distro prior to Jaunty should replace libmp3lame-dev with liblame-dev.
Thanks Jason
June 19th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
If you run into trubble and get a ‘unkown encoder mpeg4′ error, install the unstripped libraries of ffmpeg.
Cheers
July 31st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
The latest ffmpeg in subversion has removed non-free amr support, so the script won’t compile. Maybe get a specific revision in the setup-part?
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I still need to test this, but the AMR support was removed on July 7th, so in theory if you add this:
-r {2009-07-06}
to the end of this line:
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
so that it becomes:
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg -r {2009-07-06}
you should be getting the trunk the day before that support was removed. If anyone tests it, please let me know if it works and I’ll update the script.
Thanks!
August 5th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Just downloaded and setup the script today using jaunty and it worked fine without the need to add the -r tag to the svn checkout
August 11th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
[...] suis tombé sur le script androvideo qui, quelques modifs plus tard, est pour moi un parfait compromis poids/fluidité/vitesse [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Great script. Installed it on two machines running jaunty. Would be great to have option to add a subtitle file to be hardcoded.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
[...] suis tombé sur le script androvideo qui, quelques modifs plus tard, est pour moi un parfait compromis poids/fluidité/vitesse [...]
November 26th, 2009 at 11:26 am
amr is not mandatory; aac works just fine – just use the ffmpeg commandline with stock ffmpeg, it works properly
ffmpeg -i -s “480×320″ -vcodec mpeg4 -b 512000 -acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ar 16000 -r 13 -ab 32000 -aspect 3:2
(default video bitrate produces too much noise for me, hence -b 512k)
November 26th, 2009 at 11:27 am
amr is not mandatory; aac works just fine – just use the ffmpeg commandline with stock ffmpeg, it works properly
ffmpeg -i <sourcefile> -s “480×320″ -vcodec mpeg4 -b 512000 -acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ar 16000 -r 13 -ab 32000 -aspect 3:2 <outputfile>
(default video bitrate produces too much noise for me, hence -b 512k)
December 27th, 2009 at 11:01 am
You should change the convert line to
convert “$FILE”
instead of
convert $FILE
to make sure filenames with spaces will be passed correctly since they are not without the quotes.