I'm having some really strange problems encoding video for my 8130 that are about to drive me mad.

What is so strange about this is a month ago I fired up SUPER, and encoded two full length movies and a few cartoons to 3GP, copied them over to my 8130, and they play great. I went to encode some new content, and SUPER cannot encode anything using ffmpeg now. It returns errors in all cases. So I upgraded SUPER, and it does the same thing. I've posted to their forums and they can't seem to help. So using SUPER to encode to 3GP isn't available to me.

So I tried encoding with mencoder, using a copy / paste of the settings found on the sticky on these forums:

Well, that video won't play on the BB. I have encoded dozens of test videos using mencoder through the SUPER GUI using every setting imaginable (using both AAC and MP3 audio) and they will not play either. For sources I have tried both DivX AVIs and classic MPEG-1s, and none will encode to playable video (even though I successfully encoded exact same video files to 3GP before).

If I didn't know better I would think something was up with my 8130, yet the movies I encoded a month ago still play fine on it.

Anyone encounter anything like this?

After much trial and tribulation I've hit upon a combo that works. First of all, I have not been able to get any AVI's to play - regardless of the encoding. What works for me is 3GP with h263 or MPEG-4 encoded video and AAC encoded audio.

With h263 encoding you're limited to 5 resolutions, and none of them are an exact fit for the 81xx. QCIF certainly works (176x144) but the video does not fill the width of the display.

MPEG-4 is the ticket, but videos encoded at 240x260 will not play, contrary to the Blackberry FAQ. 240x176 works great (which is your standard television aspect ratio), and if you want to fill the display as much as possible, 240x240 works (but will result in stretched video). For the latter you would have to letterbox or crop the video to change the aspect ratio and not stretch the image.

As for the encoder, I could not get MEncoder to produce any videos that will play on my BB after dozens of tries. I was finally able to get a specific ffmpeg build to work for me. Now the problem is that ffmpeg is distributed in several ways, and some of the distributions do not include the stuff needed to encode. The ffmpeg build that works for me came from this Unofficial FFmpeg Win32 Builds page, and is the first build listed: ffmpeg-r12920.tar.bz2
Here are the parameters in BAT form. Just make a SOMETHING.BAT file and copy this in:
Use it like this: "SOMETHING.BAT myvideo.AVI" and it will produce "myvideo.AVI.3gp".

If you want to test without having to encode an entire video, just append "-t 20" at the end to encode 20 seconds of video.

If you want to encode with h263 at 176x144 use this:
Both of those will produce very high quality video at 720bps. I have a 4GB card, so size isn't critical for me. A Futurama episode 21:35 long encoded with the first params (MPEG-4) is 66 MB.

Dan