Comments on: Rant! What Ever Happened To Video On My BlackBerry?

By: How To: Fast Forward & Rewind Video/Audio In Small Increments | BerryReview

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:13:15 +0000

[...] music and watching video on my BlackBerry 8310 I discovered something I had never known before. In my previous Rant! about the video options on the BlackBerry I mentioned my frustration about the fast forward and rewind increments on the BlackBerry media [...]

By: Sassan Sanei

Sassan Sanei — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:56:34 +0000

Thanks for the tip, Luc!

In your example, replacing

-vf scale=320:240

with

-vf scale=320:-2

allows mencoder to preserve the original aspect ratio (automatically converting a widescreen video to a 320×180, a standard screen video to 320×240, etc.).

By: luc-mobile

luc-mobile — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:33:23 +0000

Ah, well. Not fast. Each conversion takes almost as long as the video’s run time.

I forgot to say: neither Linux nor the Mac is sure to have mencoder installed. You may have to install it by yourself. Google tells me that there is menconder for the Mac. I think it comes with mplayer or ffmpeg. Check Google.

By: Ronen Halevy

Ronen Halevy — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:01:25 +0000

Forgot to ask. How fast are the conversions?

By: Ronen Halevy

Ronen Halevy — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:01:06 +0000

Thats awesome Luc. I will have to try that out in Ubuntu

By: luc-mobile

luc-mobile — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:05:39 +0000

Hum, I don’t have that problem with the player not remembering the last position. I think that happens if I reboot the phone, but not if I close the player. No, that does not happen to me. Are you sure of that?
.
My big issue with the player is that I can’t rewind just a few seconds. It’s usually around TWO MINUTES. A big nuisance when I’m listening to a podcast and want to go back for something I didn’t quite understand the first time round.
.
Converting videos is not a lot of fun, but I concede that watching videos in that small screen (I have the Curve) is not great either, so I never really watch videos on my Berry. But I use Linux and have found a way to convert the videos very well and conveniently. I think it works on Macs too. Here it is: open a command line and run this:
.
mencoder -vf scale=320:240 “INPUT_FILE.avi” -o “OUTPUT_FILE.avi” -of avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=230:acodec=mp3:abitrate=64;
.
It is one long single line. Don’t break it. Replace scale=320:240 with scale=400:240 if it is a widescreen video. It will look better.
.
If you want to convert several videos, write this script to a file named “bbvideo.sh”:
.
#!/bin/sh
DIR=$(echo “$i” | sed -r ‘s/\/[^/]+$//’);
cd “$DIR”
for i in “$1″; do
echo “$i”
OF=$(echo “$i” | sed ‘s/^/bb_/’);
mencoder -vf scale=320:240 “$i” -o “$OF” \
-of avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=230:acodec=mp3:abitrate=64;
done
.
Then make it executable:
.
$ chmod +x bbvideo.sh
.
Then run it like this:
$ /full/path/to/bbvideo.sh /pathto/directory/with/videos/*.avi
.
That will convert all videos in the AVI format. You can use other extensions, of course. HTH.

By: Ronen Halevy

Ronen Halevy — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:20:00 +0000

I would have to agree with you. I just do not understand what RIM was thinking. Did we really need another video format. They really could have just piggybacked on Apples video success and done 10 times better. Instead they offer video support in a format that nobody else offers video in. Essentially they have made the video features useless to anybody who does not understand how to re-encode…

By: portorikan

portorikan — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:57:02 +0000

My big rant is the last one you mentioned. No h.264 videos for the Blackberry? Why? Smarter compression and smaller file size. This I hope is a route they’re taking. Granted I can use the media manager to convert itunes videos to work properly on the Blackberry but that means I have to copy them from my Mac to my microSD card, then copy them to my work windows computer, then convert them as it’s copied BACK to my Blackberry.

I would say there is room for shaving a few extra steps for me, and I’m sure others in there as well.