S60 Open to new features

This is my last post in the S60 Multimedia Blog. I recently changed jobs here at Nokia, and in my new position I won't be able to devote the time needed to keep the blog at the level of quality it deserves. We decided to put the blog into suspended animation, as it were, until Phil and the team can find a new multimedia expert to take it over. I've really enjoyed writing the blog over the last 8 months, and appreciated your comments and your attention. I hope that this has been a fun and informative resource for you as well.

-Oren

I'm off to Barcelona this weekend for 3GSM. I'll try to report back with any multimedia news and photos from the event. If you're in Barcelona, please stop by the Nokia and S60 stand in Hall 8 and say hi.

-Oren

My colleague Florin discovered that the TV Out feature available in several Nseries devices makes for a great sales pitch. He writes:

On several occasions I found myself trying to pitch S60 phones to some of my not-so-enthusiastic-about-converged-phones friends:

"Do you know you can watch movies with an S60 phone?"
"Well, who would like to see a movie on a tiny screen?"
"What about displaying it on a nice plasma TV? In good quality!"
"Hmm?"

If you have a N93, N93i or N94 N95, it is possible! They all have TV-out cables that come with the phone, in the sales package. And they all support VGA-size MPEG-4 video with more than 1 Mbps bitrate. 16:9 TV out mode is supported as well. The quality is incredible, you have to see it to believe it.

The image here is from Florin's 42" LCD TV playing one of the Nokia design videos. There are four of them, which you can see on YouTube:

If you transcode your movies yourself, using ffmpeg (as explained in a previous entry), the right command would be something like this:

ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1500000 -s 640x352 -acodec aac -ar 48000 -ab 96 -ac 2 movie.mp4

Enjoy!
-Oren