I recently acquired a Nokia 5530 Xpressmusic handset when I went over to MTN. I chose the handset because I knew it had a very high resolution full colour screen which I thought would be interesting. At 640 x 360 it is more than good enough to watch movies and tv shows.

The first problem
Despite having over 700MIPS of processing power, the phone OS and media player, as of this writing, still does not support .avi containers nor will it decode DIVX or XVID. The preferred container is still 3gp. The first step I tried was to install the official DivX player from DivX, which, works but you cannot do anything with it as the player cannot be controlled at all (no support for the 5530's touchscreen). So that plan would not work.

I tried various other pieces of software, one of which was laden with malware, but fortunately would not install on the handset. Other DivX players, were not available and in my research I found out that using .avi files and DivX players which were outside the scope of the phone's preferred video format did not yield good results.

I then decided that, to get any acceptable performance or solution, a compromise would need to be made, and that is to convert all my divx media, into 3gp files for the phone

Conversion 

I downloaded and installed several conversion utilities (again some laden with fucking malware  ) to convert my video to 3gp. Most did not work, generating a video clip that would not play on the phone. One other product worked, Mediacoder Mobile Phone edition. This program was so full of bugs, that most of the features were inaccessible due to "version number conflicts" (whoever writes software like that seriously needs to be re-educated). It rendered a video clip that played on the phone, but the quality was poor, frames were dropped, audio was shocking and some scenes were blocky and grainy, so totally not up to my standards.

The search continues
I eventually stumbled upon some freeware called Super(R). I was very sceptical, since it was a mission to get the program downloaded (the download would die in the middle and the author's attitude was sorry for you but try again). I got it downloaded, and when I ran it I immediately saw that it would probably work well, since it gave me full control of various key parameters such as bitrate (several years ago I used to be an anime fansubber and I had gained enormous experience with MPEG-4 conversion). So I tried it, the results were, amazing. The video plays with full, smooth motion on the handset, and the sound is excellent.



One of the tricks I will mention though is that, to use this program, and get good results, you will need to do analysis of the source video, and adjust the output bitrate and aspect ratio, and frame rate accordingly by a process of reckoning, something which I did on a regular basis when I used to fansub anime. But the good news is, my fears of having to sit for hours with NanDub and frameservers to ensure the audio was synched properly, were allayed when I noticed the program does it internally, and properly.

As a rule of thumb, I matched the output aspect ratio, although I scaled the image size down as you can see. I set the frame rate the same, and I reckoned the bitrate to be close to the original, but not exactly. The sets of values offered by the program drop-down box, should be used, as opposed to entering in an arbitary number.

Results

And, here is the result. I encoded Full Metal Panic, Episode 1, which can be seen here:


Obtaining the software
I am sure that most of you with this (and similar) phones would really now be interested in getting this software package. PM me for details. Due to the issues of download from the author's website, I would be willing to upload the file (23 megs in size) to my website for download