Converting flv to mp4 for use on a nokia E71 using Ubuntu 10.04

Ok… So I got this E71 as an early christmas present. I absolute love the phone. One of my justifications for getting the phone was to be able to listen to the Standard School of Engineering free E-class
Introduction to Computer Science | Programming Paradigms

You’d think this would be a slam dunk and would be easy… Ha… of course not.  First off this video stuff ain’t my thing…
Well Standford has this a link for a MP4 torrent which doesn’t seem to be working…. That would have been easy.

Well there’s an option for Itunes. (I’m thinking this will be just audio… right)

So my next path was to download a youtube video and transfer it to my phone…. Easy right??
Well I tried using bunch of plugin’s and I couldn’t get them to work.  I tried downloading youtube-dl from synaptic and it seems to be busted.  I downloaded the latest version from github (I think) and finally got that working.

So now I been able to get an flv to download.  Unfortunately youtube uses flash 9 and my E71 can only read flash 8…. Uggh….
Ok then… Time to convert the flv to something else.   Apparently mpg4 should work…..

Well than I decided to try ffmpeg.   Apparently out of the box it’s missing some stuff.
Supposedly this will help: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1117283

So… I guess the trick now is to get the options dialed in to optimize for my E71.

I found some useful information in the comments of  this post: http://nokiae71.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/watching-movies-on-your-e71-why-not/

This was interesting:

“In terms of saving memory, .3gp is definitely the best, but for better quality (trading off with filesize), mp4 seems to be a good option.”

Avi… doesn’t work… Yepp… found that

“3GP all mobiles support that natively (Except iphone). on the E71, it can be played with the pre-installed real player as well as any of the players mentioned above. I encode to 320×240@190kbps”

“Of course, mp4 works fine!
I use ImTOO Video Converter with the blackberry mp4 preset.
The fps recommendation for E71 videos is 15.”

I found this to be interesting also.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1587514

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=988366

Of course what would really be easy if Standford on their website instead of having a dead link on the Mp4 bit torrent option, re-directed to the mp4 download link on youtube (who knew they had that) and I could have saved myself hours of screwing around with this….  @#$%@%#@.

I spoke to soon…. the mp4 I downloaded fires up real player and displays sounds with no video (which is sort of irritating)…
So.. I googled a few things and found this. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9868359&postcount=1289

(I’m going to keep that in my back pocket for the moment.

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