Friday, June 25, 2010

Converting videos for playback on Blackberry Storm 9530

Playing decent quality videos on the Blackberry Storm is no walk in the park!

File size is always an issue on a mobile device. You should convert your videos to smaller screen sizes to save space. A more serious issue is compatibility. I tried to play a bunch of my AVI files on the storm but with no cigars. So transcoding video files was a necessity.

There are a bunch of utilities for Windows to convert videos to a variety of formats but nothing equivalently easy exists on Linux. Or so I thought.

Then I discovered that Tablet Encoder (perl script) for the Nokia Maemo platform works equally well for encoding videos for the Storm! Infact I realised that the default options for conversion to MPG give you a decent enough video playback. So you can just do this -
./tablet-encode original_movie.avi converted_for_the_storm.mpg
and you are done.

It squishes a 1.5 GB movie into a 300 MB filesize with very decent audio and video quality. Try it!

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