I used my cell phone to make a video with boogie2988, one of the more popular people on YouTube. We were having dinner at Sunrise Cafe here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. So when I got home, I wanted to upload my video to my channel on YouTube. When I copied the file from my phone to my computer, I saw the file type was .3gp. “What is .3gp,” I asked myself. “Surely YouTube won’t accept such a file format.” I tried playing the file on my computer. I could see the video, but there was no sound. Mplayer tried to find a plugin on the internet, but to no avail. I decided to try ffmpeg to convert the video to .mp4, just to see if I could. I used WinFF, which is a graphical user interface for ffmpeg. The file converted, no problem. The sound was coming through now and everything was good.

So I uploaded the video and YouTube did its usual “processing” thing for several minutes. When the video finally went live, I watched it and the sound was playing at the right speed, but the video was playing twice as fast as it should have been. Here is what it looked like:

I was not happy, but Boogie is a popular guy and my video was already getting lots of views, so I left it. This morning I thought to myself, “What if YouTube does accept .3gp files?” So I tried uploading it and it worked fine:

The moral of the story here is that I shouldn’t try fixing something before I check to see if it’s even broken. Comments are greatly appreciated!