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HOWTO: Convert 3gp videos to mpeg

I really dont like the 3gp format, but most mobile phones use it. So when I download the movies from my phone to my Ubuntu box I like to convert them to mpeg.

Here’s how:

First we need ffmpeg, a complete solution to record, convert and stream
audio and video.

apt-get install ffmpeg

After the install, converting videos is easy:

ffmpeg -y -i file.3gp -sameq -f mpegvideo -s cif -r25 -ar 32000 -ac 1 file.mpg

This HowTo should work on any distro as long you install ffmpeg correctly. Enjoy!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under HOWTOs, Media, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “HOWTO: Convert 3gp videos to mpeg”

  1. did you try to use also mencoder? did you use Ubuntu on your server, it seems that is is down.

  2. nah, I belive the server is running suse

  3. I belive that that should be -r 25, not -r25

  4. I get an “Unsupported codec” error when trying to convert. The video is from a sony erricson phone. Any ideas? Cheers

  5. Unsupported codec (id=73728) for input stream #0.1

    it doesn’t work for me.

  6. With the correction of Christian J, it works great!
    (tested on xubuntu 7.10)

    Thanks!!!

  7. Unsupported codec (id=86043) for input stream #0.1
    LG 8300 phone

  8. Unsupported codec (id=73728) for input stream #0.1
    Nokia 6300

  9. Works fine here, though the filesize grows extremely when converting to mpeg.
    I use this instead, as the video is already compressed in h263 and I only need to convert the sound:

    ffmpeg -y -i file.3gp -sameq -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -s cif -r 25 -ar 32000 -ac 1 file.avi

    This gives only slightly larger files.

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