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I've got some 1080p movies on my Ubuntu system, which I'd like to trasfer to my Android phone for when I'm in a situation where I have nothing to do (like an absent teacher at school). My phone screen has a resolution of 480*320.

I've tried this command;

ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -vf scale=480:ih*480/iw downsized.mp4

And it changes the resolution of the video, but the file is not as small as I'd like it to be. What else can I do to get the file as small as possible? Perhaps change the audio quality and framerate to something lower (I'm guessing 1080p video has better audio quality than my phone's sound card supports anyway). I'd like to keep the sound at the best quality the phone supports and the human ear can still hear. I'd also like to convert the sound from surround to stereo. Is there perhaps a different file format that's smaller and supported by Android 2.3?

Thanks in advance.

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  • Just out of curiosity: How big is your downsized file and how long the movie?
    – André Stannek
    Aug 21, 2012 at 11:15
  • I'm not talking about one specific movie, but the movie in question is 800MB. I stopped the conversion when the size reached 500MB, as this was too large already.
    – RobinJ
    Aug 21, 2012 at 11:40
  • I'm not an expert in video codecs but I'd say 600-800mb for a whole movie in 480p is pretty normal.
    – André Stannek
    Aug 21, 2012 at 12:17

1 Answer 1

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It is about the bitrate itself. You can change it by using a transcoding software like WinFF, Transcoder (I can't find the link for now, not to be confused with Arista Transcoder), Mobile Media Converter and even with NLES Software like kdenlive/openshot.

Transcoding will reduce the bitrate if you wish, thus the file size, but preserving the video scale/aspect ratio/size. Anyway, reducing the bitrate may harm quality if you exceed the limits.

Check this out in order to see previous answers to a transcoding question: https://askubuntu.com/a/25532/9598

BTW: You can also change the video and audio bitrates separately if you wish in order to keep sound quality.

Oh! Yes... Good luck!

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  • Arista and MMC are both broken on Ubuntu 12.04. WinFF is quite useless as it only has a few presets and most of them are broken anyway.
    – RobinJ
    Aug 21, 2012 at 16:39
  • Wait a sec... Think I got Arista working.
    – RobinJ
    Aug 21, 2012 at 16:48
  • I didn't mean "Arista Transcoder" which is useless for any tasks indeed. I meant "TRANSCODER", unfortunately at the very moment when I gave this answer I couldn't find the link, here it is: transcoder84.sourceforge.net I hope you find a way to install and enjoy. Good luck! (Yeah well... it looks a little bit like WinFF but this really does the work, forget about presets, simply do the job manually and succeed).
    – Geppettvs D'Constanzo
    Aug 21, 2012 at 19:16

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