The aim is simple: by using a copy of a film from your local disc, change its size, adjust it to the iPhone display and apply appropriate coding which will enable you to enjoy a good picture and sound quality. At first, however, I would like to emphasize, that on account of the size of the movie, I will not focus on the optimization of compression itself. Writing a script for this operation is useless - it's one line on the console: ffmpeg -i "INPUT _FILE.AVI" -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 10000 -b 7000 -r 29.97 -qmin 2 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -s 480x320 -aspect 4:3 "OUTPUT_FILE .MOV" Of course, you have to install the appropriate codecs (unless it has already been done so) and input the file (the movie).



# apt-get install libfaac0 ffmpeg mpeglib libmpeg2-4 faac

After a long and quite consuming process, the we receive an output file. Next, you install it onto iPhone//iPod Touch using gtkpod, for instance. Voila!

Synchronising the phone book.

Here the process is more complicated. You have to use the MNPlight application from the Installer repository: http://movenplay.gforge.inria.fr/iphone. The application functions are well described on the project's main page, I strongly believe, however, that you should have no problem with understanding it. The MNPlight application enables the import and export of the telephone book in Mozilla Thunderbird format (Google Mail) as well as the export//import of the calendar in Google Calendar format. Additionally, it has some other functions which I have personally never used. I recommend visiting the website for further information.

Your ringtones from mp3 to iPhone

Attention! This process works only with iPhone with 1.1.1 software. iPhone uses the sound encoded in AAC format. Most of us have files in *.mp3 or *.ogg format. The process of conversion itself is an uncomplicated one. Firstly, the you convert a sound file into *.wav format using mplayer, next you convert the *.wav file by the appropriate coder (faac), which creates an m4a output file. I wrote the script which automates the above-mentioned process:

#!/bin/bash # Sebastian 'night' Łuczak # http://night.jogger.pl # Conversion of mp3 to iPhone ringtone

echo "Insert the name of mp3 file (without extension!)" echo -n ">" read IN OUT="`ls | grep $IN.mp3`" echo " I convert mp3 to wav:" mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:fast:file=$IN.wav $OUT faac -b 128 -c 44100 -w $IN.wav rm $IN.wav

You have to change the extension of the received output file from *.m4a to *.m4r and add one space bar before the extended file, e.g.

$ ls ringtone.m4a $ mv ringtone.m4a "ringtone.m4r" $ ls ringtone .m4r Now, let us pass on to iPhone 1. Download the corrected file MeCCA 2. Install the corrected file in: /System/Library/Frameworks/MeCCA.framework/ 3. Install the file m4r in the catalogue /Library/Ringtones/ 4. Restart the telephone

The ringtone should be available in the telephone menu.

The OpenSource tools, as we can see, enable to use iPhone independently from iTunes and Apple's products.

Copyright (c) 2008 Adam Nowak