What Vid Formats are playable on what phones & devic

[MacHarborGuy]

I run a small self-owned video store in No Mans Land, Michigan. I am currently reconstructing my website, and a book that I have talks about WML and serving web sites to cell phones.

One thing I would like to try is to make small previews of the movies that can be previewed on these cell-phones, but I do not know which formats would be the best formats to use, nor do I know which cell phones or devices support said formats.

I searched google, and usually have great luck finding information there, but so far haven't turned up anything useful.

I know that H.264 is supposed to be ultra-scalable, but without knowing what wifi devices support the format I don't want to spend the long time of encoding just to find out I have unusable files.

Anyone got any useful insight into this matter?

[bugster]

Are you talking about a WAP site for mobile phone use?

If so, probably the widest supported format is .3gp.

This is an mpeg4 format in its own container. You can get a frewware encoder for this on Nokia's website.

Other supported formats are rm (Realmedia, all Nokia Series 60 Phones) and wmv (All MS smartphone products).

Remember to keep the resolutions really low like 176x144 or less, consider reducing framerates to ~15fps and use pretty low data rates, oh, and mono audio at 8 or 16kbps.

Quality of such video tends to be pretty crap, but watchable enough for a 1 or 2 minute tr5ailer/teaser I suppose.

[Hyper Shinchan]

3GPConverter
it's a good free software to encode your video to 3gp, 3gp2 and psp. it's very fast and it can make audio also in AAC.