I used to scoff at the prospect of watching movie clips in your cellphone. After all, who’d want to watch something in very small screen when you can always watch it on your PC or TV. I’ve watched 3GP movie clips in various phone demos and did not find it something to drool over.

But after watching movie clips in mp4 format, I found that I don’t mind watching movies in smaller screens–especially during times when you have nothing to do like waiting for an appointment or while traveling. Clips in mp4 format have better resolution so I went ahead and converted movie clips I wanted to watch on the phone.

For the conversion, I used ImTOO MP4 Video Converter, a software that makes it very easy to convert video files for your handheld device. It costs $35 but it offers an evaluation version that is limited to converting five-minute clips.

I played around with its settings and the first few clips I converted could not be played on the K750i. It turned out that I made a mistake in not changing the video size from the default 320×240 value. The K750i will not play videos, albeit you can hear sounds, bigger than 176×144.

After changing the video size, I was able to play the clips, although the video was jerky. I surfed various sites and discussion boards and found that changing the frame rate from auto to 25fps produced the best result. To change from auto to 25fps, just click on the word Auto beside Frame Rate and directly enter the new value. If you find that you cannot change any of the values in the right menu, make sure that the video you want to convert is highlighted in the main pane.

Here’s a screen capture of my conversion of a NerdTV episode with Bob Cringely interviewing Bob Kahn. The subtitles are hard to read in small screen and you might be better off just listening to the MP3 version offered for download in the PBS site.