Linux - 21 - Playback of 3GP, 3GPP mobile phone videos

Video codec

Videos recorded on the Sony Ericsson K700i and many other phones are in 3GPP format. File extension generally .3gp or .mp4. To play these back you'll need MPlayer with quicktime codecs enabled.

If you have an older version of MPlayer than 1.pre07 then fix is to add format 0x33363273 the the ffh263 section of your /usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf file. You may need to copy codecs.conf from the mplayer source tree.

videocodec ffh263
  info "FFmpeg H263+ decoder"
  status working
  fourcc H263,U263,h263,X263
  fourcc viv1 h263
  driver ffmpeg
  dll h263
  out YV12,I420,IYUV
  format 0x33363273

Audio codec

Audio codec used is AMR, source provided free by 3gpp.org, however because of licensing issues is not included in MPlayer or ffmpeg source tree.

Latest versions of MPlayer (1.pre07 at time of writing) and FFMPEG (codec library/tools) have AMR support, just no code...

1. Download MPlayer/FFMPEG source, uncompress etc
2. Create directories within the libavcodec subdirectory as below.
3. Download the latest version of each codec into the directory indicated, unzip, and move all code to top level (unzipping will create subdirectories)
4. Enable support for AMR within MPlayer/FFMPEG...
   ./configure --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb
5. Build MPlayer