The other day, I was in a situation where I had a lot of time on my hands. A LOT of it. I sometimes get that with my job. (Trucking, meh, it pays the bills) And All of my Linux Journals had been gone through at least a couple of times. My first smart-phone is a Crackberry, er, BlackBerry Curve. It's the device that is most likely to go wherever I go. Laptops, NetBooks, Magazines, etc, might not make it into my pocket.
The Mobile Media Converter is a free video and audio converter for converting between popular desktop media formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR audio (amr) and 3GP video. Also, iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported.
An integrated YoutTube downloader is available for direct downloading and converting to any of these formats. Also, you can trim your clips for ringtone creation or any other purpose and crop your videos for removing up/down black bars or other unwanted parts of the image.
The program has a very easy-to-use and simple GUI (Graphical User Interface) that helps even the most amateur user. Most of the times, the only data that you must enter is the input file(s) or just drag 'n' drop the input file(s)! The 3GP and AMR formats are used by mobile phones for MMS, video and sound recordings, etc.
At first, I didn't think that it would convert .ogv video files (aka, ogg theora) to .gp3 files, or to anything for that matter. It doesn't default to recognizing the .ogv format, and I couldn't add them via it's own file manager. And it didn't really make mention of support of .ogv files. So I didn't think that it would be a simple one-step solution to putting something on my phone to watch. But it is. What worked for me (Also maybe I should mention that I'm running Intrepid, Ubuntu 8.10) is to just add Mobile Media Converter to the files properties option in Nautilus. [Open With] tab in Nautilus. It takes a right click on the highlighted file to get there, BTW.
Highlight and add the files you want to convert...
And Viola! It'll crunch and spin the 1's and 0's into a format that my Freedom Hatein' phone will digest and spew out on my screen. Granted, watching a Screencasters or Meet the Gimp episode on the phone isn't ideal. But it's something to look at, and if I DO happen to have a laptop with me, I can watch something, and hopefully learn something while I'm twiddling my thumbs, and harass friends on twitter or identi.ca a little less.. Heck, I might even get around to putting something like a movie on the phone to watch...
