Nokia N95

I finally bit the bullit earlier in the year and signed up for a mobile contract. My change in attitude was mainly down to envy and desirability of some of my friends Nokia N95 that seems to be able to do pretty much everything I might want from a phone/PDA.

You can create your own themes using the on-line tools at OwnSkin.com. I've created a few myself…

• Diocese A theme using a picture I snapped whilst climbing in Cornwall.

The table below details some of the many applications that I've installed on my phone. Some are better than others, and some I use more than others, but I thought I'd compile this list as much as a reference for myself as anyone else.

Installing RotateMe was a bit problematic, mainly because the Symbian installation file that constitutes the package and allows it to be installed needs to be certified and all of the versions that I could find did not have a certificate. However, a bit of digging lead to this thread which indicated that the application needs to be self-certified which was straight-forward.

1. Grab the rar-ed (compressed) SIS from here.
2. Unpack the compressed rar file (under *NIX its unrar e [filename] under M$ you can probably use unrar/WinZip/PowerArchiver)
3. Find out your phones IMEI number, simply dial *#06#
4. Sign the package yourself using Open Signed Online
5. Follow their instructions and re-download the RotateMe application
6. Copy the application to your phone via USB
7. Disconnect and go into your file manager and find the application, select and install

The Nokia N95 is capable of recording, and from my perspective, playing back videos. If you're watching something you've recorded yourself with the phone then you won't have a problem. However, if you want to rip a DVD and watch it you will find that despite having a 8Gb of space available on a microSD card you won't be able to watch them on your phone. This is because the N95 has a specific set of codecs for videos and you therefore need to rip and encode your DVD/movie into the correct format before transferring it to your N95.

To rip DVD's I use media-video/dvdrip a simple Perl GUI front-end to the command line tools. I've not played with this much but I'd imagine this can be used to rip DVD's directly to the correct format and size, but for the time being I rip the DVD first and then convert it to the desired format and size in a separate step.

Of course you won't always start with a DVD, sometimes you will have a file that you obtained from elsewhere that needs converting. The following script does this for you using mencoder (that comes bundled with Mplayer) to check how to scale the video correctly and then uses and then ffmpeg to resize/encode . The original script was found here (note though that the original was slightly dated as the new codec is called libfaac, hence the update/revision).

#!/bin/sh
# Re-encode existing media files, suitable for viewing on a N95 (or
#  similar S60 device)
# Uses ffmpeg to do the re-encoding to MP4, and mplayer to query the
#  resolution, so we can figure out how to scale it to 320x???
# Details on how the bitrates were selected can be found at
#  http://gagravarr.livejournal.com/129314.html
#
# v0.03 - 2008/12/26
#
 
RATE=350000
ARATE=96000
 
IN=$1
OUT=$2
 
if [[ "$OUT" == "" ]]; then
	echo "Use:"
	echo "  $0 <in> <out.mp4> [size] [framerate]"
	echo ""
	echo "Where the size should be something like 320x180"
	echo " (if not given, will scale to fit 320 pixels wide)"
	echo "And the framerate should be something like 23.98"
	echo " (if not given, ffmpeg will try to use the current one)"
	echo ""
	exit 1
fi
 
SIZE=$3
if [[ "$SIZE" == "" ]]; then	
	# Query it, via mplayer
	echo "Detecting the size of $IN..."
	RAWSIZE=`mplayer -ao none -vo none "$IN" 2>&1 | grep 'VIDEO' | awk '{print $3}'`
	echo "Detected a size of $RAWSIZE"
 
	# Scale to 320x???
	RAW_W=`echo $RAWSIZE | awk -F 'x' '{print $1}'`
	RAW_H=`echo $RAWSIZE | awk -F 'x' '{print $2}'`
 
	# Scale it to a multiple of 2, rounding up if needed
	SIZE_W=320
	SIZE_H=`perl -e "print int((${RAW_H} / ${RAW_W} * ${SIZE_W}) + 0.5)"`
	SIZE_H=`perl -e "print int( int(${SIZE_H}/2) * 2 )"`
 
	SIZE=${SIZE_W}x${SIZE_H}
	echo "Picked a scaled size of $SIZE"
else
	echo "Using specified size of $SIZE"
fi
 
FRATE=$4
if [[ "$FRATE" == "" ]]; then
	# Do nothing
	FOO=1
else
	FRATE="-r $FRATE"
	echo "Using specified framerate of $FRATE"
fi
 
echo "Video bitrate will be $RATE"
echo "Audio bitrate will be $ARATE"
echo ""
sleep 4
 
# Off we go!
ffmpeg -i "$IN" \
	-f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -b $RATE -s $SIZE \
	-acodec libfaac -ar 48000 -ab $ARATE -ac 2 \
	$FRATE   $OUT

Simply copy and paste the above code into a text-file called n95enc. Save it to a location thats in your $PATH and make it executable (chmod 0755 /path/to/n95enc) and thats it. Obviously you need to have Mplayer and ffmpeg installed so that the script works, but thats simple (under Gentoo emerge -av mplayer ffmpeg after setting your USE flags in /etc/portage/package.use).

This was originally written up as a blog entry.

As I use the GNU/Linux distribution Gentoo on all of my computers I am unable to use the Nokia Software that comes with the phone. This isn't too much of a problem though as the phone mounts as a USB device and is very easy to use. However, there is some software that facilitates moving data too and from the phone, particularly over bluetooth, that utilises the OBEX Protocol.

There are a number of OBEX packages currently available under Gentoo. Because I use Xfce4 and Fluxbox as my preferred desktop and have all the GTK+ libraries I require I opted to use gnome-vfs-obex. To install, set your USE flags in /etc/portage/package.use and then emerge…

emerge -av gnome-vfs-obex

First step was to see how things worked via USB connection, so I plugged the device in. Although I already have custom udev rules to mount my devices I was pleasently surprised to find the device listed correctly under the default Xfce4 file-manager (Thunar). Unfortunately the device is mounted as being owned by root and as such the read-write permissions are not correctly set for users.

This is really what I'm after as currently there is no secure FTP client for the N95, so its a pain having to connect the phone to a computer to copy music over. Unfortunately my current desktop doesn't have bluetooth enabled, but after I purchased a bluetooth module for it my laptop does.

I had a look around at the possible solutions for connecting the N95 via bluetooth, and quickly found the rather nice GUI Blueman. Whilst it is in Portage it is currently hard-masked, and unmasking caused lots of dependency headaches. I opted for the older ebuilds in bugzilla. Of the SVN ebuilds available I've used the one dated 2009-01-17.

• Nokiasoftware.net
• S60.com
• n95users.com : knowledgeable forums.
• Nokia Forums
• BySamir : various applications.
• OpenSignedOnline : self-certify applications.
• allaboutsymbian.com : reviews and articles on the Symbian OS.