How-To: Videos and Movies on Your Nokia Cell Phone
Written by jon on 6:49 AMNokia Cell Phone Videos and Movies: A Short Guide Using SmartMovie
Today's how-to: how to get divx/avi/movie file onto your Nokia cell phone! Symbian OS required.
The first (and only) program you'll need is called SmartMovie. Designed by Lonely Cat Games, SmartMovie doesn't have much of an equal for the smartphone video market...
You can download a demo from the website that lets you use the program with some little annoyances - the word "Demo" on the top of the screen and some greyed out images.
Once you download the SmartMovie software, you'll also need a codec. Codecs contain encoding and decoding routines that uncompress video on-the-fly (while you're watching it). All 3.10 and above versions of SmartMovie support 2 codecs: CoreMP4 and XviD.
The SmartMovie software contains the phone executable and the Windows software that lets you compress movies to fit on your Nokia cell phone.
Run the setup.exe file to install the SmartMovie converter onto your pc. Once it's installed, run the program!
Inside SmartMovie
The first thing you'll want to do is open up the Preferences menu on the menu bar. Here you'll get a nice little box with a couple options on it - the most important option you need is the "Target device type and screen" box. Click on the selection box and choose the correct screen size/device type (for N90 it would be "Series60 high-res 352x416"). Then click close.
Now that you're done messing with settings, it's time to open up your video clip file. Click open or do a File->Open and browse to your video clip file which should be in divx, xvid, or in some other common readable format.
SmartMovie Settings
This is what you could call the bread and butter of SmartMovie. Also the biggest pain in the *beep* as everything is trial and error: you'll have to experiment with various settings to find the best combination of codec and codec options for your Nokia cell phone.
I usually uncheck the "Reduce Frames" checkbox, change the encoder to "XviD Encoder," and set the bitrate to 512 kbps. It works well for lower resolution Nokia cell phones such as the Nokia 6260. However, Nseries phones that have higher resolution screens require a bit more processing power because you need to decompress a larger image (which slows things down). So you'll need to lower the bitrate to probably something like 256 or 320 kbps. I haven't found a good combination for my N90 phone that I'm happy with yet but I'll update this as I test out some more stuff. (I still have yet to test out the CoreMP4 encoder)
On the other hand, Lonely Cat Games recommends checking the "Reduce Frames" checkbox and setting the framerate to something lower like 160 kbps. It's entirely up to you.
Click the "Convert" button to start the conversion. For a 1 minute clip on my computer, it takes about 15 seconds.
Once your movie clip is done encoding, transfer it to your Nokia cell phone via any of your favorite methods. I find it a lot easier to just use an MMC card reader or writer and just copy the files to a video directory on the MMC. SmartMovie will scan your entire MMC card anyway so it doesn't matter what folder it's in.
Let's fire up SmartMovie!
Browse to the folder where you installed SmartMovie (if you can't find it, it's probably in a directory called "My Own" and give it a whirl.
Choose the option to "Scan for movie files" and SmartMovie will provide a list of compatible AVI files. Pick your movie and you're golden!
You can change options like brightness, time remaining/elapsed display, and a couple other things in the settings menu.
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