New phone, new toys 
Just got a new Verizon RAZR V3M phone and being how I am I have to see what I can do with it. The is no Java on this so I’m pretty much stuck with BREW which means I’ll have to buy apps off of Verizon’s service. Bummer since there is a lot of good Java apps for this phone available. Verizon has done a lot of things to make the phone as non-customizable as possible, less for them to worry about with support (curse the world of idiots!). Even the GUI is pretty static, there are 3 options by default and the differences is that it almost changes the colors…you really need to look to see a difference.
MP3 support is there in a half-ass way and the only way to get audio on it for playback is to sync it through Windows Media Player (10 or higher) which will then convert them into wma’s…why waste our time with having to convert these things? Of course this means I’ve only been able to do that when running Windows, which is about 5 minutes every 3 months or so (I have to use my aging laptop or wife’s computer to put music on). Ringtones are even tougher to get on the phone, I’ve found the best way is to email it as an attachment from gmail. I’ve used wav and mid files, I think mp3 will work for ringtones also.
Videos was the fun part, since I mainly use Linux and didn’t want to rely on Windows apps like eRightSoft’s Super which did a great job converting videos into 3GP format which the phone uses, I’ve dug around, found and tested various ffmpeg options and think I’ve found the ideal combination.
audio sampling frequency = 8000
number of audio channels = 1
audio codec = amr_nb
video codec = h263
frame size = 176×144
frame rate = 14.985
video bitrate = 190k
audio bitrate = 32
force format = 3gp
[code] ffmpeg -i {input_file} -s 176x144 -r 14.985 -b 190k -acodec amr_nb -ac 1 -ar 8000 -ab 32 -f {output_name}.3gp[/code]
With this I’ve been able to record an episode of South Park from a 175M avi to a 32M 3gp which plays back very nicely on the RAZR. The final file can be made smaller by tweaking the video bitrate (-b), changing it to 140k results in a 25M at lower video quality. With a bitrate of 190k the quality is good enough to read text so you can play around with that setting depending on what you want.
Getting the video to the phone is the tough part because yet again Verizon limits you with this wanting you to get videos from them with their fees. Even though the phone connects to a PC with a standard USB cable it is not file system friendly and is tricky to do even with Windows. What I find that works good is I got a 1GB MicroSD card ($14 after shipping from NewEgg.com 
) and formated the card with the phone. After that using a card reader you can find and add files there. Videos need to be put at the root of the card before any of the directories. Then they can be played from the “My FLIX” in the “Get PIX & FLIX” menu
, and at about 32MB for 22 minutes that’s a lot of South Park 
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