Take YouTube Mobile

A reader named Rich recently asked if I’d had any success exporting FLV to 3GPP format. I’ve exported QuickTime movies (.mov) to 3GPP in the past, but have never tried converting from FLV. I did a post last year showing how to convert MOV to 3GPP.
Luckily the syntax for converting FLV to 3GPP is nearly identical and looks like the following:

ffmpeg -i airplane.flv -r 15 -b 50 -s sqcif -an test.3gp

The source file came from this YouTube page and was easily converted to 3GPP format using FFmpeg. You can see it running in the QuickTime player here:

and this should run on most mobile phones supporting video as well.  Let’s take a quick look at the parameters:

-r set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)
-b set video bitrate (in kbit/s)
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation) sqcif stands for sub-quarter common interchange format and is represented by 128×96
-an disable audio

Unfortunately I had to disable audio because FFmpeg kept throwing an error.  I’ll have to dig into this some more and see what I can find out.  Please let me know if you’re able to encode audio and I’ll be glad to update this post.  I hope this helps.