Jake’s Life

I’ve had a 2GB media card for my phone for a while. I used it with my Dash, my Wing, and now it sits in my Blackberry Curve. The only thing is that besides storing ringtones and photos that I take with the camera (so that the onboard memory doesn’t get filled up) I haven’t done much with it. There’s plenty of space for video though, so I decided to start encoding some TV episodes and other video files for it.

Blackberry Desktop Manager comes with a modified version of Roxio Media Manager 9, but as is usual with bundled software, it’s bloated and not very flexible. It is pretty easy, grabbing your media files from your computer and dropping them on your media card, choosing to convert them for the device, and watching the bar slowly creep towards 100%. I prefer to use slimmer apps though, such as MediaCoder or SUPER.

Both programs are fairly straight forward, although SUPER is a bit more flexible, and the interface a bit more crowded. Both apps will let you save presets, which is great when you find just the right format to encode video files to. My issue was finding that format since so many forums and sites slightly vary based on the author’s experience, and this one will too. I converted a video using Roxio Media Manager which output a file as follows according to Media Player Classic:

Video: MPEG4 Video 320×240 [Elecard MP4 Video Handler (ehs)]
Audio: AAC 44100Hz stereo 96Kbps [Elecard MP4 Audio Handler (ehs)]

The audio bitrate varied from conversion to conversion so it’s probably set to not mess with it unless it’s too high. Given widespread issues of audio not being in sync with video I’m inclined to keep it where it is, but others have had success changing it.

In Media Coder I used a different format:

Video: MPEG4 Video 320×240, 300 Kbps, 20 fps
Audio: LAME MP3 44100Hz stereo 96Kbps

The file played great, and cut a 6MB file down to just under 1MB. (If you want to load my preset download it here.)