For my sins, I’m currently the happy owner of an 8520 Curve. It has an awesome little media player that is perfectly capable of handling video provided it has been encoded correctly. While there are other utilities that get the job done quickly and easily, I wanted to try encoding the video using VirtualDub which has great features for automation and job control.

We’ll be encoding the video using H.263+ at a resolution of 240 x 180. Audio will be encoded as MP3.

1. First, get hold of a copy of VirtualDub. If you are not familiar with it, you can regard it as your new swiss army knife for video processing.
2. Open up your video file. If your source file’s audio is already MP3 then open the audio menu and select Direct Stream Copy. If not, go to the Audio menu and select Compression, select Full Processing Mode, then Compression and configure the Lame MP3 codec to a suitable quality. I used 192kbps average bit rate and it came out fine.
3. First we need to resize the video, so open the Video menu and select Full Processing Mode, then select Filter. From the list, select the resize filter and configure it to resize the video to 240 x 180.
   
4. The next step is to configure a video filter. Open the Video menu and select Compression, then select the ffdshow codec. Hit configure and select the H.263 encoder. In my tests I used a 400kbps, but you could probably get away with higher.
   
5. The final step is to open File and select Save as AVI. Open it up in VLC to confirm it plays and then copy it across to your device.Enjoy!