Please note this is written for Sprint phones.  It doesn't necessarily work with any other carrier and is not known to work with Rumor II phones.

Items you need:

Firefox

DownloadHelper addon for Firefox (or, optionally, a FLV downloader)

SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html)

VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)

Find a version of a video you like on YouTube. In my case, I am going to look a video of a song that was used on Aqua Teen Hunger Force - "I Want Candy" by MC Pee Pants (aka MC Chris).

When I open the URL, DownloadHelper immediately starts its odd color gyrations and I see there is an FLV file called "I_want_Candy_-_MC_Pee_Pants.flv". I go ahead and save this file to some place convenient.

I used VLC to view the video clip and note the clock counter in the playback for when I want the video clip to start and end. In this case, the first verse starts at roughly 10 seconds and the portion I want ends at 37 seconds - a 27 second clip which is close to ideal.

I launch SUPER and in the Window under the words "DROP A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILER HERE", right-click and select 'Add multimedia file(s)'. Select your flv file and click the 'open' button. The file, including its path, should appear.

Make the following changes to SUPER for the correct output of your file:

1 Select the output container: choose '3g2 (Sony Ericsson)'.

2 Select the output video codec: choose 'MPEG4'

3 Select the output audio codec: choose 'AAC LC'

In the 'Video' section, make the following changes:

Video scale size: 176 x 144

Aspect: 11:9

Frames/sec: 10

Bitrate: 144

Under 'Options', make sure nothing is checked - especially 3g v4.

In the 'Audio' section, make the following changes:

Sampling Frequency - 22050 (you probably can use lower)

Channels - 1

Bitrate Kbps - 48

DVD Language Select - Default

In the end, you should have something that looks like the following:

Now, this is where you choose the section of the clip you want for your ring tone. Earlier, I mentioned making sure nothing was checked in the 'Options' window of the 'Video Section. There is a button for 'Other Opts'. Click that and a window should slide out of the left side of SUPER. In this window, I want to select 'Do Not Encode The First' and in that resulting box I put '10'. This will skip the first 10 second of the clip. Now click the 'Encode Only For a Total Duration Of' and in the box I put 27. This should give me all the clip between 10 seconds and 37 seconds which is the clip I want. Something like this:

Click 'Encode (Active Files)'.

Now I want to go check out the output. SUPER annoyingly saves this in its installation folder which, for me, is: C:\Program Files\eRightSoft\SUPER\OutPut and is titled: I_want_Candy_-_MC_Pee_Pants.flv.3G2. I will change this to candy.3g2. IMPORTANT NOTE: the Rumor seems to detest filenames with capital letters. It will play the video in its media player but will not set the file as a ringtone. I play the file in VLC to make sure the clip is the right length and starts and stops where I want it to. If it isn't quite right, I can easily re-encode a new file and tweak the SUPER settings.

Fortunately, it turns out to be just about exactly what I wanted so now I have to put it on the phone. This can be done with Bluetooth but, to be honest, most Bluetooth packages suck so I opt to use a USB flash reader/writer. I have found that placing the file in the DCIM\100LGDCF (yours may be something other than "100LGDCF") is pretty failsafe. The file should appear in the My Albums | Memory Card area.

The big caveats are the following:

The Rumor seems to hate capital letters in either the file name or file extension. I have no idea why but I have seen it puke on a file with a capital letter and be perfectly content with the same file when I simply change the file name to all lower case.

The Rumor seems to have a 512KB limit for video ring tones. Almost every one I have made is 200-250KB max.

YouTube videos may have low volume which the Rumor doesn't play well - the speaker is pretty small. It might be worthwhile to find a way to amplify the audio track. SUPER has an 'Adjust the Encode Volume' option in the 'Other Opts' window which might be worth playing with. It does amp the sound but it also can max distortion so you have to play around to get the right setting.

Performing any of the steps in this document will be done so at your own risk. I haven't seen any issues with my phone but that isn't any guarantee of your success or failure in making ringtones. Also, any use of media in making a ringtone is done so with the implication you have legal rights to use such media.