Encoding video for the Blackberry Curve on a Mac

After trying a few different methods (QuickTime Pro, iSquint) of encoding video for the Curve I’ve found a simple tool that works. Using Alec Peden’s Universal Build of mencoder and his Automator Workflow; converting a video for the Curve was as simple as right clicking the file.

QuickTime Pro took too long and seemed to hang, while iSquint worked fine except for the audio was out of sync. Menucoder worked perfectly the first time and in a reasonable amount of time too. Took an 173M AVI file down to 57M, plugged the Curve and now that I have the 2GB microSD card in it mounts as an external drive leaving me just the task of copying it over.

Having never messed around with Automator before this I’m thinking that between it and PocketMac I might not need to try any other Blackberry to Mac syncing applications. If I can get Automator to recognize when a drive is mounted then I should be able to get it to copy audio, pictures or videos that I’ve recently re-encoded.

This entry was written by michaelb, posted on June 21, 2007 at 2:26 pm, filed under Apple, Blackberry. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

6 Comments

  1. Glen Richardson

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for publishing this article, very helpful indeed.

    I have a Blackberry Curve 8310 and every video conversion application I tried made the sound go out of sync.

    Menucoder works great and very easy to use (just a right click). I edited the Automator workflow file to scale=320 and vbitrate=500 . Works great, very good quality !

    Thanks again, I can now watch the WSOP 2007 on my Blackberry !

    Glen.

    Posted September 27, 2007 at 2:52 pm | Permalink
  2. Alva

    Umm. Using QT on Leopard you then export using 3gpp option (rather than avi) to desktop then load it onto the Blackberry Curve. Seems to be the way it was designed to work.

    Posted December 24, 2007 at 5:23 am | Permalink
  3. michaelb

    Alva, keep in mind when that post was written Leopard was not released publicly yet, but thanks for that tip.

    Posted January 2, 2008 at 11:11 pm | Permalink
  4. brian

    Alva, what settings should we use for the QT/Leopard method? There’s a lot to choose from in there! TIA.

    Posted January 29, 2008 at 10:23 pm | Permalink
  5. TWheatn

    Great Tip. Surprising how painful it was to find this but this is a great post.
    Also the follow up with the improved settings for a Curve was very helpful.

    Now to find the optimal settings for converting jpgs to send to my Curve

    Thanks

    Posted March 22, 2008 at 12:54 pm | Permalink
  6. Don Divinagracia

    Hi,
    Good article… Alva, I am just curious, when exporting using 3GP, what settings do you apply? I tried using the 3GP settings on my Blacberry 8800 with:

    Video Format: MPEG-4
    data Rate: 64 kbits/sec
    Image size: 320×240 QVGA (kept spect ration Letterbox)
    Frame rate: 15

    Though I am able to view the video on my phone, The video is a little choppy…

    I don’t mean to sound a perfectionist, but the sample video that was preloaded on my device is way smooooooth. Anybody know the exact settings for that video? All I know is that it was mp4. Thanks guys.

    Posted June 8, 2008 at 3:20 pm | Permalink

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