cunsolo.it Giuseppe Cunsolo webpages

I have a couple of videos I made with my cellphone camera, and I want to watch them on my computer.

Searching "linux 3gp", I discovered why under Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 I can watch the videos using kaffeine, xine and VLC whilst i can't hear anything.

Looks like I'm missing the AMR codecs.
"No biggie, I can get them installed ..." is what I thought.

Now, looks like that there are two ways to get the AMR codecs under ubuntu:
you can manually install the codecs under the xine engine.
Or, you can recompile ffmpeg with the AMR support.
(take a look here and here too)

Both the solutions are not trivial, and I don't really want to be bothered with "the Ubuntu way" of get-the-stuff-and-compile.

There is, indeed, another option: use the Medibuntu repository, and install the packages "with AMR support" enabled.

For some odd reason, this is not working for me.
And trying to manually install the ffmpeg package "with AMR support" from http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lead to a warning:
"Error: A later version is already installed"

ffs, enough is enough ...
now I'm really pissed off

I know what to do, plain and simple. Throw all the .3gp on a USB stick and turn on my compaq evo N400c which still runs gentoo.
(yes, it is a pIII mobile and it does run gentoo easy and smooth!)

# emerge -pv ffmpeg
# nano -w /etc/portage/package.use
to enable the USE flags "amr xvid", which were disabled
# emerge -v ffmpeg
10 minutes later (on a f*cking pIII mobile...) i have a working ffmpeg "with" AMR support

Now I can fire VLC and hear the audio track of 3gp files. And I can use ffmpeg to convert my files from 3gp to avi. Or whatever video format I wish.

This is it, plain and simple.
Gentoo > Ubuntu every single day of the week :)