Movie Playback on the BlackBerry Bold Using Badaboom

Getting The Movies on the BlackBerry Bold

In order to get the movie to your BlackBerry Bold 9000 you need to move the file over from the computer to the MicroSD memory card. First you’ll want to place the MicroSD card into the BlackBerry Bold 9000, so it can automatically write some directories once the card is read by the phone. Once this is done, you can remove the card and find a way to get it connected with the PC. In order to do this you can use plug the MicroSD card directly into your flash reader and drag and drop the files into a file called “videos” in the BlackBerry folder. If you don’t have a MicroSD card reader you can use the microSD to SD adapter and use it in a flash card reader that supports SecureDigital cards or use the USB adapter. The Kingston Mobility Kit is nice as it gives three options to use and it will work on nearly every computer in production today. Once the files are moved over by dragging and dropping them you can insert the media card back into your phone and play them with the video player that comes with the phone.

Once I started watching movies I noticed that they has a slight stutter to them in scenes where the action was fast and a lot was going on. To me stutters ruin any movie, so I had to find out a solution; and then it hit me.

I went back to Badaboom and under Advanced Settings there is a tab called Video Encoder. This tab allows you to change the bit rate of the encoded video. I transcoded the movie at the highest possible bitrate, which was 2500kbit. The bit rate refers to the number of bits used per unit of playback time and in this situation it was 2500kbit, which might be too much for the 624MHz processor found in the BlackBerry Bold 9000. I began lowering the bit rate and found that a bit rate of 1000bkit worked flawlessly on the BlackBerry Bold 9000. It took about six transcodes and 90 minutes of time to figure that out, so I hope that tip saves people some time. The nice thing about transcoding the movie at a lower bit rate is that the file size decreases, which means you can fit more movies on your MicroSD card. Using Mr. & Mrs. Smith as an example, here is an idea of the file sizes you can expect at a few different bit rates.

Bit Rate	File Size	Movies on 8GB MicroSD Card
2500kbit	2146.2MB	3
1500kbit	1303.6MB	5
1000kbit	886.3MB	8

The Kingston 8GB MicroSD card has 7.41GB of available space, so with a bit rate of 1000bkit one could fit roughly eight full length movies based on the transcoded size of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Lowering down the bit rate smoothed out the movie, made for a smaller file size, lowered the transcoding time down to under 14 minutes, and no image quality difference could be seen on the small 480×320 resolution display.