2009 02 28 converting videos to 3gp in ubuntu intrepid 810 with ffmpeg

Converting videos to 3GP in Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 with FFmpeg

The default installation of FFmpeg in Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 doesn't support conversion to 3GP. According to this, installing ubuntu-restricted-extras should fix this, but that didn't work in my case. So, you may need to manually install the required packages:

sudo aptitude install \
libavcodec-unstripped-51 \
libavdevice-unstripped-52 \
libavformat-unstripped-52 \
libavutil-unstripped-49 \
libpostproc-unstripped-51 \
libswscale-unstripped-0

Then, to convert a video, you can either go the command-line route:

ffmpeg -i input.mpg \
-vcodec h263 -s qcif -r 15 -b 100k \
-acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ar 32000 -ab 64k \
output.3gp

Which will convert to input.mpg to output.3gp with:

• H.263 video codec
• QCIF video resolution (176x144)
• 15fps
• 100 kb/s video bitrate
• AAC audio codec (through libfaac)
• 1 audio channel
• 32000 Hz audio sampling frequency
• 64 kb/s audio bitrate

Alternatively, if you prefer using a GUI, you can try Mobile Media Converter (direct link to v.1.4.1 .deb), which seems to work pretty well, and also supports downloading videos directly from YouTube.