Nokia phones cannot handle common video formats. That’s a fact we cannot change.

If you are using Windows, Nokia gives you a handy tool for converting. But if you are using linux, you are lost?

Well. First of all, linux user are never lost. Second – there is a handy tool called ffmpeg. So let’s build a small shell script:

#!/bin/bash
filein=$1
fileout=$2

#Check ffmpeg's compilation flags before using this script

ffmpeg -i "${filein}" -f 3gp -vcodec h263 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -b 120 -acodec libamr_nb -ar 8000 -ab 10.2k -ac 1 -s 128x96 "${fileout}.3gp"

… and so the phone is happy again.