Tips on encoding videos for Android using Adobe Media Encoder

— 1 minute read

As a Flash Professional user, you probably have Adobe Media Encoder installed on your computer. This is a great tool to encode videos not only for Flash video player but also for other H.264-enabled devices like iPhone and Android. However, when I tried to encode a video using a random H.264 preset, my phone (a Milestone 2) could not play the video. This means that not every export settings is compatible with the phone’s internal video encoder.

So which preset should we choose for the export settings?

I suggest you start with a preset for mobile such as “Apple iPod, iPhone (Widescreen) Video” (assuming Adobe Media Encoder CS5). For a Motorola phone like mine which has higher screen resolution than said preset I have successfully encoded my video with “YouTube Widescreen SD” for a better quality video. From these presets, you can tweak the settings a little bit to perfectly match your phone’s screen. Typically, you can set size and bitrate of the video and leave other settings alone.

I found these settings are perfect for my Motorola Android phone (854x480):

  • Format: H.264
  • Preset: YouTube Widescreen SD
  • Frame Width: 854 (or leave it as 640)
  • Frame Height: 480 (or leave it as 360)
  • Target Bitrate: 1
  • Maximum Bitrate: 2

Of course my source video has aspect ratio of 16x9. Otherwise, I would select a similar preset for 4x3 videos. You can try other presets at your own risk.

media encoder
media encoder

[Vietnamese tag: Vài lưu ý khi tạo video cho điện thoại Android với chương trình Adobe Media Encoder]