[Tristan Raghnall]

Hi, new to this forum and also fairly new to my Pearl 8230. But I'm enjoying it very much so far.

The current challenge is getting video to play on it. No end of troubles there.

I've hunted around but the information is very hard to find. Various PDF manuals say nothing about supported video formats. But in another forum here, this was listed, which is similar to what I have found up till now (sorry, link to post wouldn't go through. I'm just new to forum.):

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The standard formats a BB will play are...
MP4, 3GP, WMV & AVI, the thing is their is file size limitations that are placed on those as well as they have to be encoded to a specific profile for most of them, the most compatible format is 3gp.
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RIM specifications
bla1ze is definitely the expert on BB video.

but fwiw, here is what RIM says about the 8830:
BlackBerry - BlackBerry 8830

"Supported video formats: MPEG4 Part 2 Simple Profile, H.263, WMV"

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I re-encoded some video to various formats within container avi and in both WMV7 and WMV9 codecs, etc., etc., but nothing plays. Some will play for a few seconds then crash while others have no sound, etc.

I dl and tried the BB converter app but that produced problem video, as well.

The AVI format I use works on various DVD players and on my computer so I know codecs are fine on my system. But BB seems to choke on them.

And I don't understand the MP4 data above:

"Supported video formats: MPEG4 Part 2 Simple Profile, H.263, WMV"

What the heck does that mean, anyone know?

Another specifications list showed various other formats with components like the above but despite my extensive video editing, etc., experience I can't make heads or tails of them much.

What can we do to get our vids to play?

Though to be perfectly honest my preference would be to be able to use my digital movie collection. I bought a 500gig external hard drive last year then digitized my movie collection which I had converted to DVD a couple of years ago. So now most of my movies are in AVI format already. I use an XviD codec in AutoGK on all media so though container AVI, still fairly standardized.

Is there not the option just to dl specific codecs so that a format will play? That's all we have to do on the PC.

Thx.

[Tristan Raghnall]

Found Xmedia Recode. Turns out I got help from video people instead of Blackberry people! Hmmm ...

Anyway, Xmedia Recode is a freeware that has a Blackberry profile you click so it's a nearly a one-button affair. And all the vids I converted work great on my Pearl.

So this one seems resolved.

[hubermania]

Not sure how much of this transfers to the 8230 but I imagine the video capability is identical to the 8220. I've been using FormatFactory to rip DVDs for playback on my 8220. As you probably learned from your video pals, the file is a container for the encoded video. The 8220 will playback 3GP, MP4 or AVI file formats (I haven't tried WMV) that contain Xvid, MPEG4, or H.263 encoded video. The 8220 would not playback any H.264 encoded video regardless of what file format it was stored in; I got sound but no video.

If you want the video to play widescreen/sideways on your flip, you'll have to rotate it 90 degrees [or did they fix that in the 8230?]. FormatFactory will do this as part of the one-step conversion, but FF screws up the aspect ratio when rotating widescreen videos. For all my anamorphic widescreen DVDs I had to tell FF to size it to 320x180 when rotating. Otherwise it stretches the 16x9 video to fullscreen sideways and it looks like cripe.

The best conversion settings that I've found were 384kbps at 24fps. Lower baud rates looked blotchy, and slower frame rates looked jolty.