Every Flavour Beans

If you are looking for information on how to convert DVD format to AVI(DivX/XviD) format, refer to my earlier posts on video conversion.

The technical specification page of Nokia N800 claims that the device can play a variety of video formats but in real experience it plays only a very limited number of formats. I strongly recommend installing MPlayer on your N770/N800 as it makes it possible to play many popular media formats(e.g. DivX/XviD) which the N800 won’t play in its default state. (Open the file mplayer.install from your N800 to install it.) You still won’t be able to play most of the videos that you have stored on your hard drive (or elsewhere) by directly copying them to N770/N800 - you need to convert them to a proper resolution that N800 supports, and occasionally, take care of the frame rate and data rate too. There are many tools available that can convert a given video to a format than can be played on N700 or N800 and one such easy to use tool is Media Converter(also called Nokia N770 Video Converter) created by Urho Konttori.

Install Nokia N770 Media Converter on Your Computer

Download Media Converter for Windows and run the executable. (Mac and GNU/Linux versions are also available from the same page. This tutorial applies to all platforms except this installation part.) Follow the wizard to complete the installation. You will find a menu entry for it created in the start menu. Run the application by going to Start Menu -> Media Converter -> Media Converter.

Convert DivX/XviD/etc Format to N800 Format

1. The interface of the main window of Media Converter looks like this:
   
   (Click to see the enlarged version of the screenshot)
2. The first thing to do here is to select the appropriate settings for the conversion process. Media Converter provides quite a few options in terms of settings and I encourage you to experiment with them and see what type of movies(documentary vs action movies) convert best with what type of settings(13fps vs 18fps).

   Select your device(either N770 or N800) from the “I Have” dropdown box. I suggest you to start with “N800 High Quality (400×240)” which I consider to be a safe choice(as opposed to ‘creates best quality video’). (Select something similar if you use N770 tablet.) The video and audio bitrates will be automatically selected for you but you can still change them if you want to. If you are not satisfied with the converted video at this resolution, you can retry with the other video resolutions and see what works best for you. You have to experiment like this only once though; when you find the setting that works best for you, you can then note it down and use it for all the future video conversions(Media Converter remembers the last selected conversion settings, so you don’t have to enter them again and again). You don’t have to convert the complete video file while doing experiments; read Step 3.

3. If you want to merge subtitles into the video file during the conversion process:
   1. Name the subtitle file exactly the same as the video file except the file extension, e.g. Black Book.avi and Black Book.srt
   2. Copy the subtitle file to the folder where the video file is located. In other words, video file and the subtitle file should be in the same folder.

   

   3. Select ANSI or UTF-8 from the “Subtitles(.srt)” dropdown box in Media Converter.

   Media Converter doesn’t currently support all subtitle formats and encodings but it works well with the popular formats that it supports. You can always merge the subtitles first with the video file and then convert the merged video file using Media Converter.

4. There are other options that you can select like “Enhance Color” and “Audio Gain” that come handy with some video files. “Optimize for fullscreen” should be selected by default and you can leave it like that. If conversion time is not an issue with you, I strongly recommend selecting the “High quality conversion(2 passes)” option. A 500MB video file typically takes less than an hour with 2 pass conversion on my computer. YMMV. The remaining option “30 sec preview only” can be used to convert only the first 30 seconds of the video file, which is useful for experimenting with different resolutions and video rates.
5. As a final step, add a single video file or a list of files by clicking “Add file(s) to queue” button. (You can add multiple files from the same folder by clicking on the files while holding the Ctrl key on Windows.) You can also drag and drop the video files on Media Converter main window. All the files that you have added will be listed in the table. When you are done adding all the files that you want to convert, click the “Convert Videos” button to begin the conversion process. The converted videos are stored in a directory called 770 which will be created in the directory where the source video is present. You can select a different destination directory if you want by clicking the “Select Directory” button.

   

   After the conversion process is finished, go to the directory where the source video is located and there you will find a directory named 770. Go into that directory and you will find the converted video file in it. Copy that video file to your N770/N800 (by connecting through the USB cable) and then play the video using the default media player or MPlayer or any other media player of your choice(e.g. Canola).

End Notes

The interface of Media Converter looks good on Mac OS but looks horrible on Windows and GNU/Linux. Perhaps it can be enhanced using a custom Java Swing look & feel. Make a trip to its neatly designed website. Maemo wiki has an informative article about video encoding for N800.

Another easy to use Free video conversion tool is Nokia N800 Video Convert by Paolo Sessa. (Of course you can use any video conversion tool to convert videos to N800 format as long as you know what settings and codecs to use, in case you are wondering.) I will try to adapt this post to use Video Convert instead of Media Converter in a future post.