Nokia's Communicator devices are advertised and also considered as business devices, with features designed for the corporate people. The latest Nokia E90 Communicator however is based on the common Symbian Series 60 platform, and it boasts cutting edge mobile multimedia features as well. In fact, the E90 with it's high quality 800x352 display and a powerful DSP processor for multimedia is actually one of the highest performing mobile video players on the market! The wide PDA side display is almost ideal for viewing video content and even movies, while stereo headset provides good quality audio. This guide tells you how to transfer your video files (Divx, AVI, WindowsMedia, etc.) into MP4 format supported by the E90 with near DVD-quality results, so that you enjoy your movies or videos on the road conveniently. And best of all, this is achieved by using a free open source application MediaCoder.

This guide is aimed for people who are relatively new to video converting. If you have some expertise in video encoding, you can use this guide as a starting point for converting videos into any device that supports MP4 format – all you need to do is to adjust the settings accordingly (resolution, bitrate, etc.).

In this guide we will use MediaCoder application, which is able to convert your videos to E90 compatible format. We are using pre-configured settings so that using the program is as easy as possible. Here are the required files:

• MediaCoder
• E90 settings preset XML file for MediaCoder

STEP 1: Setting up MediaCoder

After you have installed MediaCoder and downloaded the E90 settings XML file, you need to apply the pre-configured settings. Navigate to File -> Load Preset and select the E90_settings.xml file.

Now your MediaCoder is set and ready for converting video for the Nokia E90 Communicator.

STEP 2: Using the MediaCoder

Now that we have already set up the program, converting videos is trivial. Just use Add button to add the files you want to be converted to the processing list.

Just hit to start the conversion. It will take some time to complete, so sit back and enjoy the show.

About the Video Encoder Settings

We are using MPEG-4 Simple Profile for video encoding. As you may have guessed, we're using XviD, which is a great implementation of SP (and ASP) profile. However, we could use MPEG-4 with more advanced profiles such as ASP or AVC, but the experience has shown that the E90 performs best with the SP profile, being able to decode high quality video streams while maintaining a smooth playback framerate.

By default, we are using two SP features which you can disable if you want to:

• Adaptive Quantization. AD uses more compression on the parts which are hard to notice for human eye: the light and the dark scenes. This saves some bits for other scenes. This feature should generally yield better visual quality, but if you have a very light or dark movie, you may want to disable this option.
• Trellis Quantization optimizes DTC coefficients but it slows down encoding a little. The usefulness of trellis depends on the input video, if you feel that your video encoding take too much time, you may want to disable this.

However, for the optimal quality, use the default settings.

Few Words about the Audio Encoder Settings

As for the audio, we are using Nero's AAC encoder and to be more specific the used audio format is LC-AAC (Low Complexity Advanced Audio Coding). HE-AAC could be used also, but LC-AAC is used for good reasons:

• Potential compatibility issues
• LC-AAC's quality is very good and suitable for this task

We are also using quality preset with Nero's encoder to get the best result for the bitrate range. In quality mode, it's impossible to predict the final filesize but the quality will definitely be the best for that bitrate. The quality setting we're using is 0.31, which yields a LC-AAC stream with bitrate of ~80kbps.

Version history:
02-Aug-2007 - v1.00 - Initial release