Mobile phone video formats & conversion

March 22, 2006 2:42 AM

A couple of questions about mobile phone video formats:

1) What are the major formats? I've seen 3GP, 3GPP and MPEG-4 but are there others?
2) Any recommendations for software to convert them into something useable? Ideally Flash flv but otherwise a common format like MPEG-1/2, MOV etc.
3) Does anyone produce a server-side package or service to do this?

Many thanks.

posted by blag to Technology (5 answers total)

Best answer: Apple's QuickTime Pro copes with 3GPP without issue although I doubt it will help you with Flash, which is relatively annoying to convert to something useable like MPEG. Pretty much every piece of modern software can read MPEG4.

I'd imagine you can probably wrangle ffmpeg into doing what you need.

I'm not aware of a server-side package, but it shouldn't be too hard to write a web accessible wrapper around ffmpeg.
posted by majick at 2:48 AM on March 22, 2006

I asked a related question a while back, I hope the answers there are of assistance!
posted by PuGZ at 2:52 AM on March 22, 2006

All Windows Mobile based phones will also support WMV; unsure if that would qualify as a major mobile format though.
posted by ed\26h at 4:04 AM on March 22, 2006

Last night, I googled and found an extremely simple dos-based command line interface converter for .3gp to .avi - there's a helpful FAQ section here.
posted by coach_mcguirk at 6:18 AM on March 22, 2006

Response by poster: Great, thanks for the help folks.
posted by blag at 10:04 AM on March 23, 2006