Choosing a format
I’d really like to analyse formats in terms of quality and output, but in this case, it’s just one option that really worked for me. To view videos on your mobile, there are basically two formats you might choose from, divx and 3gp. Since most of my (and probably your) movies are in divx, I tried that option first and installed the symbian divx-player from mobile.divx.com; you have to register with the free movie-portal stage6.com first to get access to the installer file for the divx-player, but that doesn’t take too long. Anyway, after installing it, I tried three of my movies and only one worked properly; the other two didn’t show anything in the player. So to me, the divx-player is just to beta yet to be worth a try.
3gp-files are by default supported by the real-player in the Nokia N95, so I went for that one. And this finally worked…
Choosing a conversion tool – divx-to-3gp
Looking for free tools for 3gp-conversion took my a few hours to find truly free versions without try-and-buy, “sorry, you can only encode 2MB” bs. It looks like software vendors don’t tell you anymore about the limitations built into their trial-versions… Anyway, I finally found two; one is the Nokia Multimedia converter and the other one is Acala 3gp movies. But again, the verdict on the software is not really about quality. The Nokia Multimedia converter simply flipped all my videos around when I encoded them, so all the content was mirrored from the left to the right and vise versa. At least with Acala encoder worked. It’s a quite simple tool.
The only things you have to configure are frame size (depends on your mobile, 320×240 for the Nokia N95), Video quality, Audio codec and the codec format. Sounds more complicated than it actually is…
First, the codec format you choose doesn’t make any difference; you can select 3gp, 3g2, 3gpp and 3gpp2. But – they all yield the same file size and quality; sounds a little buggy. 
The sound format should be aac; other options are amr_nb and mp3; mp3 doesn’t play on the Nokia N95, so aac is a save option and doesn’t really make a difference in terms of file size.
The selected video quality really matters. You can select between low, acceptable, normal, high and excellent.
normal quality
high quality
excellent quality
The increase in quality certainly comes at the price of file size. So with a 5-minute music video you’ll have 6MB for normal quality, 8.3MB for high quality and 15.3MB with excellent quality. That’s about 140/200/370MB for a 2-hour movie with normal/high/excellent quality.
It’s your choice, but I guess, with today’s prices around 10-15 Euro for 1GB micro-SD, normal is not the perfect option…
