Quicktime Mobile Video and FFmpeg

I was suprised to find out that FFmpeg supports 3GPP format. I’ve been using this mobile format to take videos of my daughter with me on the road. Quicktime Pro supports exporting to this format and does a great job of it. My only complaint is that it takes an EXTREMELY long time to do so.

Once again FFmpeg has completely suprised with its 3GPP support. I was able to encode the video of my daughter in about 1/10 of the time as Quicktime with near the same quality output. I’m still trying to figure out the optimal settings as there are so many parameters that FFmpeg supports. The magic command is:

ffmpeg -i ellas_first_year.mov -r 15 -b 50 -s sqcif -an ellas_first_year.3gp

and the video looks great on my P900. Once I figure out the optimal settings I’ll be sure to post them.

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