The HTC Desire is a Smartphone capable of playing a wide range of multimedia formats. Its 3.7-inch AMOLED touch-sensitive screen has a stunning resolution of 480 x 800 (WVGA) and its 1GHz processor provides plenty of processing power.

It supports 3GP, 3G2, MP4 and WMV video formats and AAC, AMR, OGG, M4A, MID, MP3, WAV and WMA audio formats.

The following guide will explain how to encode video to playback on the HTC Desire.

I use Handbrake (0.9.4) to convert the video. It is free and can be download from the Handbrake homepage.

- Run Handbrake

Presets
- Select the iPhone preset. This will give you most of the settings.

Source
- Click the "Source" button. Select either a video file or the video_ts file of an unencrypted DVD.

Destination
- Click the "Browse" button and set the destination file. You can use either a "mp4" or "mpv" extension.

Output Settings
- Set the Container to "MP4 File" and check "Web Optimized".

Picture
- Check "Keep Aspect Ratio" and set a height of 480. The width should adjust itself but must not exceed 800.

Video Filters
- Check the four video filters are "Off"

Video
- Set Video Codec to "H.264 (x264)".
- Set Framerate to "Same as source".
- Set the Avg Bitrate to 1500 and check "2-Pass Encoding".

Audio
- Under the Audio tab select the first track so it reads "Selected Track : 1".
- Set the audio codec to "AAC (faac)"
- Set the Mixdown to "Stereo"
- Set the sample rate to 48Khz
- Set the bit rate to 160Kbps

Advanced
- Under the Advanced tab ensure "CABAC Entropy Coding" is unchecked.

- Now click "Start"

... and wait for your video to encode!

Notes : You may wish to experiment with lower video bit rates. I have encoded some videos using 1000Kbps and they look ok.

If you copy your videos to a folder named "video" in the root of your SD card then the videos appear in the standard "Photos" app.