Converting video for old Nokia N800 - help please

[dormant]

Can someone give me some help on the best way to convert videos to play on my old Nokia N800, which I have just resurrected.

I'm a novice ffmpeg user on Linux, and I'm slowly going mad trying to find the correct options.

The video formats it supports include these:

,avi, MPEG4 (SP L2), MP3 audio, 640x480
.avi, H.263 (Profile 0, Level 10), MP3 audio, 640x480

[Selur]

Does ffmpeg even have a MPEG-4 Simple Profile Level 2 encoder?
As a side note: Why not convert to something better? The N800 should be able to playback H.264 and MPEG-4 ASP both with aac audio,...
Attached a file that uses MPEG-4 AVC Base Profile and LC AAC audio,..

[jagabo]

ffmpeg has an MPEG 4 part 2 encoder capable of simple@l2. Try something like:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -vf scale=640:-4 -c:a mp3 -b:a 128k -c:v mpeg4 -profile:v 0 -level:v 2 output.avi

Profile 0 is simple for this encoder. You can probably use the xvid encoder too "-c:v libxvid".

[Selur]

You are right, totally forgot that the MPEG-4 ASP encoder also supported normal Simple Profile (level 0-3), still using H.264 seems like a better choice.

[jagabo]

Yes, h.264 should give better quality and/or smaller files. But the device may have more limitations for h.264. GOP size, b-frames, bitrate, frame size, etc.

[dormant]

ffmpeg has an MPEG 4 part 2 encoder capable of simple@l2. Try something like:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -vf scale=640:-4 -c:a mp3 -b:a 128k -c:v mpeg4 -profile:v 0 -level:v 2 output.avi

Profile 0 is simple for this encoder. You can probably use the xvid encoder too "-c:v libxvid".

Many, many thanks for this - the resulting video plays perfectly on the N800.

[jagabo]

You may want to specify a video bitrate to get better quality. I'm not sure what the device supports but try something like "-b:v 384".

[dormant]

Sorry to be a pain, but any idea why this bash alias doesn't work?

alias avi2n800='for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -vf scale=640:-4 -c:a mp3 -b:a 128k -c:v mpeg4 -profile:v 0 -level:v 2 "${i%.*}--n800.avi"; done'

I get "No such file or directory". There are definitely avi files in the working directory.

[jagabo]

Sorry, it's be 30 years since I've worked with *nix based operating systems. I don't remember such details. Try echoing the command line and looking for the error.

[dormant]

Thanks anyway.