First there was text messaging--keeping in touch while exercising your thumbs. Then there was picture messaging--so your friends could see how much fun they were missing. And now there's multimedia messaging--short little video clips playing on tiny screens. Picture messaging is particularly interesting because you can cross the border from the phone network to the PC world, sending photos by email and even posting them to the Web, accessible from any device, desktop, or mobile.

But what about those little video clips? They're just big enough to be a pain to send from phone to phone, and yet so small and so short for playback on a computer screen. Even worse, mobile phone video clips can be tricky to play and edit on a computer, since they use the new and evolving MPEG-4 format. As with tiny clips from other devices, like digital cameras and camcorders (recorded on solid state memory cards), these MPEG-4 files can be struggle to work with, since they are nowhere near as well-supported as good old MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

Apple has taken a leadership role in championing MPEG-4, and carriers like Verizon Wireless therefore explicitly recommend using the Apple QuickTime Player to play clips from mobile phones. The QuickTime Pro upgrade, for editing and exporting video, also supports editing and saving video in mobile phone formats. These formats work well in QuickTime version 6.5 on Macintosh and Windows, and continue forward into the new QuickTime 7, which also adds MPEG-4 support for advanced H.264 video compression.

In this article, I'll use the QuickTime Player to view and deconstruct clips created by several camera phones. I'll show you the details of the MPEG-4 format for mobile phones--called 3GPP--and work around some of the idiosyncrasies of how different devices create slightly different formats.

Shooting Camera Phone Videos

For this project, I shot video clips with three camera phones: the LG VX7000, Motorola V710, and Samsung SCH-a890, using Verizon Wireless service.

Author's note: The SCH-a890 ($169 from Verizon with online discount) is particularly interesting because it supports the faster EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) data service, which mean you can receive data up to ten times faster than the current 1xRTT service (averaging 400 to 700 Kbps, and peaking up to 2 Mbps), although the upload rate is still slower (40 to 60 Kbps). In addition, this phone also not only captures and plays MPEG-4 clips, but it also supports Verizon V CAST service for playing video-on-demand clips, which use the Microsoft Windows Media format.

Video phone clip playing in Apple QuickTime Player 7 for Windows (3GPP2 file, MPEG-4 video at 176 by 144 resolution)

The cameras used in mobile phones are sporting more impressive picture resolutions (the SCH-a890 shoots still images from 160 by 120 up to 1280 by 960). However, the video clips are captured at low 176 by 144 resolution, at 15 frames per second. In addition, these cameras will capture only a maximum of 15 seconds of video, all of which limits the size of the resulting files to around 180 KB.

To capture a clip on the Samsung SCH-a890, choose Multimedia from the main menu, then Camera, then Take Flix (as opposed to Take Pix, for stills). The display then shows the live video feed from the camera, with options to adjust the image quality, digital zoom, rotation, brightness, color, and flash. The camera rotates so you can shoot self-portraits while facing the display, and the video even flips automatically so you can see yourself right side up.

Then click to record a clip, again up to a maximum of 15 seconds. You can save the clip in a video gallery in the camera's local memory, send it on as a message to another phone or via email, or upload it to the Verizon Pix Place picture/video messaging Web portal.

Author's note: By the way, sending lots of text and pictures, and especially video messages, in this way makes the carriers happy, since you're either paying by the message, or signing up for more advanced unlimited plans (around $5 to $10 per month for various packages with unlimited text messages, $15 for pictures, and $20 for video messages).

More carriers are starting to offer phones with an external memory card slot, which provides a more efficient (and no-fee) path for exchanging files with a computer (as well as opening the possibility of downloading albums to the phone to use it as a portable media player). There's not much support for a direct USB wired connection in today's phones, but there is growing support for Bluetooth, not just for connecting to a wireless headset, but also for transferring files (this depends on supported phone features and carrier policies, but is getting better).

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