Analysis and Solution to Failure of Video Conversion into 3GP or AVI

Sometimes we may meet with failure of video conversion into 3GP or AVI using some video conversion tools . We will now discuss the reason and the way to solve or avoid this problem.

The failure of video conversion into 3GP or AVI refers to the limits of video codec based on H.263 and audio codec based on amr_nb. The video size based on H.263 can only be 128 x 96, 176 x 144, 352 x 288, 704 x 576 and 1408 x 1152 to fit the screen resolution of the portable devices such as cell phone and PDAs, while the audio bitrate based on amr_nb has relevant limits which can only be 4.75, 5.15, 5.9, 6.7, 7.4, 7.95, 10.2 and 12.2. The above parameters are under the condition of the sample rate: 8000 and audio channel: 1. Take video to 3gp converter (old version) for example. The parameter setting panel can be seen at the bottom right of the main window .

Therefore, when you choose the customized output 3GP or AVI format in profiles of the converter, check whether the parameters at the bottom right panel of the program meet the requirements of the above-mentioned numerical values or not. If there is any difference, change the parameter to be one of the above-mentioned numerical values of the video codec and audio codec. Before you do this, remember to choose the added video to avoid failure in setting parameters. The setting shown below is for reference.

Sample setting

You may think the above method a little bit complicated, so we recommend you to change video codec to mpeg4 or xvid and audio to faac as shown below, which has no such limit to convert videos into 3GP or AVI files.

Besides, you can also choose other output formats such as MP4 which have no limit in video codec and audio codec.

Some of the older model portable devices may support 3Gp only. In this case, you may need to pay attention to parameter settings. After conversion, transfer the video to your devices and try to play it to test it is OK or not.

If you need better quality in video conversion, there are two ways as below.

1. You may need to set the parameters as below:
a) Video Codec: MPEG-4, xvid, x264, etc.
b) Audio Codec: mp2, mp3, faac, etc.

2. Change the bitrate. The higher it is, the better video quality will be.

In addition, your portable devices such as cell phone need to support playing good-quality videos.

Below are the explanations of relevant terms from wikipedia:

video codec

A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video. The compression usually employs lossy data compression.

There is a complex balance between the video quality, the quantity of the data needed to represent it, also known as the bit rate, the complexity of the encoding and decoding algorithms, robustness to data losses and errors, ease of editing, random access, the state of the art of compression algorithm design, end-to-end delay, and a number of other factors.

H.263 represented a significant step forward in standardized compression capability for progressive scan video. Especially at low bit rates, it could provide a substantial improvement in the bitrate needed to reach a given level of fidelity.

audio codec

An audio codec is a hardware device or a computer program that compresses/decompresses digital audio data according to a given audio file format or streaming audio format. The term codec is a combination of 'coder-decoder'. The object of a codec algorithm is to represent the high-fidelity audio signal with minimum number of bits while retaining the quality. This can effectively reduce the storage space and the bandwidth required for transmission of the stored audio file. Most codecs are implemented as libraries which interface to one or more multimedia players, such as XMMS, Winamp or Windows Media Player.

H.263

H.263 is a video codec standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for video conferencing. The next enhanced codec after H.263 is the H.264 standard, also known as AVC and MPEG-4 part 10.

H.263 has since found many applications on the internet: much Flash Video content (as used on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, etc.) is encoded in this format, though many sites now use VP6 encoding, which is supported since Flash 8. The original version of the RealVideo codec was based on H.263 up until the release of RealVideo 8.

Xvid

Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. Xvid features MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.

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