Fun with Moho and video cell phones

stephen · Post by **stephen** » Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:38 am

I found a new fun use for Moho, creating animations for video cell phones.
I have figured this out on my own, so I might not have all the details just right, but...
It looks like these phones use a media file format called 3GPP2. Now Moho does not output this format, but you can output a Quicktime file and then use Quicktime Pro to convert to 3GPP2.
There seems to be different flavors of 3GPP2 (just like AVI and Quicktime). My phone seems to need the MPEG 4 codec. Also Quicktime Pro gives the options of 176x144, 128x96, 96x80 or pass through dimensions. My phone looks like it outputs 176x144 so that is the size I used.

Anyways I was able to make a short cartoon, format it in 3GPP2 and send it to my phone. For some reason, I could not just mail it to my phone from my Mac mail application. when it got to the phone, it downloaded, but then the phone said the attachment type was unknown.
However, Verizon (my provider) provides a picture website for customers with picture phones, www.vzwpix.com, If I log in there and upload my video to the website, then have the message sent from the website to my phone, it works!

There is something satisfying about being able to carry a Moho animation around on my cell phone to show my friends.

For the test cartoon, I limited its run time to 15 seconds because that is the maximum video length that my phone will record on its own. I am not sure yet if I can send a longer cartoon, and I have not yet tried a soundtrack. Hopefully the length of the cartoon is only limited by the amount of memory available in the phone.

Stephen

spasmodic_cheese · Post by **spasmodic_cheese** » Fri Apr 29, 2005 7:23 am

great idea!

yeh, Mac mailer is notorious for f**king up attachments.

cribble · Post by **cribble** » Fri Apr 29, 2005 4:54 pm

I sent one to my friends phone (wasn't one of my animations)... he had a proper bitch at me for sending it as it was a large file.... never again! Though, then again, this expands our market. Think about it, as well as being able to animate for TV and Web, we can also do phones...

stephen · Post by **stephen** » Fri Apr 29, 2005 5:30 pm

Maybe he is paying by the Kbyte.
Personally I would be happy to get video from my friends, except none of them have video phones.

I looked more into the sending of attachement problem on the Mac. If I tell the Mac to send a windows friendly attachment I am able to send .wav .jpg and .mid files and they work properly. I still cant send video .3g2 files though.

I also found out that the verison website I am using to send the cartoons to my phone limits the length of the video to 30 seconds.

Maybe if I get a data cable I can download a longer cartoon.

Stephen