.FLYINGHEAD MOBILE MOVIES
.TITLE Playing DVDs on your PDA
.AUTHOR James Booth
.SUMMARY Wouldn’t it be great to be able to take your movies, TV shows, and home movies on the road? Well sure, you could get a portable DVD player. Wouldn’t it be better if you could take them on your handheld? With the two pieces of software News and Contributing Editor James Booth introduces you to, you can do just that.
Let’s get the show on the road! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to take your movies, TV shows, and home movies on the road? Well sure, you could get a portable DVD player. The prices on those have even come down considerably of late, but that’s just one more gadget to carry around.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could take them on your handheld? With the two pieces of software I’ll introduce you to, you can do just that.
.H1 Make it fit
In order to get your DVD on your handheld, first it will have to be down-sized, or reduced, to fit the screen. Our first application is Pocket-DVD Studio from PQDVD.com, shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Pocket DVD Studio sports an easy-to-use interface.
With a version for Palm and one for Pocket PC, Pocket DVD Studio is an all-in-one Windows application that will transform your DVD into an AVI of appropriate size for your Palm or Pocket PC. With Pocket DVD Studio, you can fit up to three hours of movie onto a 128 MB, 256 MB, or 512 MB memory card. Of course, the more you try to squeeze onto a card, the more compression, the more "lossy" the movie, and the more the quality will suffer.
Pocket DVD Studio supports handheld screen sizes from 160×160 to 480×320, with audio boost, subtitle support, and six cropping modes. You can encode entire DVDs, just small sections, or split a movie over a number files according to a size you determine. For example, if you have two 128 MB cards, you could encode the movie for 256 MB and split it across two files.
Using Pocket DVD Studio is as simple as inserting the DVD in your DVD-ROM, and clicking "Open DVD." After the DVD is scanned, Pocket DVD Studio will select the longest track by default, as the longest track is usually the movie.
The Resolution drop-down menu is where you’ll select the resolution of your encoded file. Through much trial and playing around, I’ve figured out that you get much better results by encoding a smaller resolution, but at higher quality. Of course, I’m trying to squeeze all my movies so far onto a single 128 MB card. Maybe it’s time for a bigger card, eh?
Underneath the Resolution drop-down menu is the Quality & Size slider. This is where you’ll tune the size of your file. Of course, the bigger the file, the better quality. But be warned, if the resolution and quality is too high, your device might not be able to handle it.
.BREAK_EMAIL This is a pretty snazzy solution. Tap here to read the rest of the story.
I’ve noticed that the output size in the slider is really more of an estimate than a hard setting. In every video I’ve encoded so far, the size has come out considerably smaller than what Pocket DVD Studio estimates. In one sense, this is good, in that it doesn’t underestimate the file size. On the other hand, you can be pretty far into the encoding before you realize that you could have gone a little higher with the quality.
With the cropping modes, you can set the encoding to make the most of the image on your handheld. There are a couple of crops that will work best depending on whether you have a square or rectangular display. It can be set for the maximum available image, to incorporate subtitles, or to display a full letterbox-type image.
Speaking of subtitles, the Subtitle drop-down will let you choose from whatever subtitle language tracks are encoded on the DVD. I had to play around with this on a couple of movies as sometimes films will have subtitles in them, but they won’t always be displayed with the default subtitle setting, which is None. Then again, sometimes they are.
The Audio setting is something I have found can generally be left alone, as Pocket DVD Studio chooses the best setting. It also gives the audio track a bit of a boost, which can be adjusted under Settings, to make it a little louder on handheld devices.
Now that all your choices are made, all that’s left is to click Start. The movie will begin encoding, saving to whatever directory you chose in the Settings. Pocket DVD encodes the movie on the fly, as the track is read, so it will take about as long as the movie does to play. The good thing about this is, you can stop at any time and have a playable AVI file of the movie up to that point. This is great for checking how the movie plays on your handheld before encoding the whole thing.
Across the bottom of the Preview slider is the Status display where you’ll find the percentage completed, amount of movie time encoded so far, how long the program has been encoding, how much time is left, the file size encoded so far, and the estimated total file size. As I said, every file I’ve encoded to far has come out considerably smaller than the estimate.
I feel I must include a disclaimer here. Legally, you can only encode movies that you own, not rent, and only for your own personal use, not for distribution. Even at that, some countries still have restrictions on doing even this. It’s best to know the laws where you live. Of course, if they’re DVDs of your own creation, such as home movies or independent films that you’ve made, then it’s all good.
.H1 Playing it
Now that your movie has been encoded for play on the handheld, you’ll need something to play it with. This is where MMPlayer comes in. MMPlayer is a Palm OS-based media player for playing MP3s, AVIs, and MPEGs in their native format.
In other words, they don’t need to be encoded to a PDB file in order to be used. You merely load the file onto your memory card; select it in the Playlist screen, and tap Play.
The native file support is what really attracted me to MMPlayer. As far as I know, MMPlayer is the only Palm media player that supports native media file formats. I’ve used other Palm media players that require extra encoding, and I think MMPlayer has them all beat.
It’s possible, and even probable, that video files encoded for play on a PC will have a bit-rate too high for the handheld. In this instance, there are freeware programs available, such as VirtualDub, which will allow you to lower the bit-rate to a more acceptable level. The MMPlayer manual even contains instructions on how to use VirtualDub to re-encode a video to optimal play if necessary.
MMPlayer features all of the standard media controls, such as Play, Pause, Stop, etc, as shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B MMPlayer offers the standard media player controls.
In addition, there’s a built-in amplifier and equalizer, brightness and contrast control, and a pan feature for balancing the sound left-to-right.
MMPlayer also lets you insert bookmarks in the movies for saving your place, or noting a particular scene. I have noticed though, that on large files with high bit-rates, the bookmark feature has a tendency to mark the place several minutes forward of where you are. I imagine this has something to do with the caching of the file.
MMPlayer also supports full screen playback, and a rotation feature, letting you rotate the movie to best fit the screen. In addition, there’s a zoom function for both windowed display and full screen playback. Figure C shows some screen captures.
.FIGPAIR C These are actual screen captures from my Tungsten T2.
FIGPAIR D shows captures of the same scenes, but encoded at a higher resolution and quality.
.FIGPAIR D These are actual screen captures from my Zodiac.
[Editors note: Be aware that some of the choppiness in the colors of the image shown above is not due to the program, but to the fact that we down-sampled the author’s JPEG screen captures to GIF images, so things like the light-saber glow will look far better in real life. At some point, we’ll update our journal production system to display higher-quality photos, but the loss of quality is definitely not the program’s fault.]
Users can customize their MMPlayer with different skins as well. The standard package comes with two skins, the default, and a simpler, subdued one for handhelds with less memory. There are also several other free skins available for download on the company site, along with a skinning kit to create your own skins.
MMPlayer gives you virtually complete control over playback, letting you set the video and audio buffer, with on-screen buffer indicators if you so desire.
Along with all of these other features are performance warnings that pop up to let you know if the buffers are too small, if the resolution is too large, or the bit-rate too high. You can also customize the settings for these warnings by turning them off completely if you like.
The support I got from MMPlayer was top-notch, too. Magnus spent the better part of a day trying to solve a problem I was having with my registration key. Finally, after giving me a logging version of the program to track what was going on, the developer determined that my mail client was cutting off part of the PDB file, rendering the key useless and emailed me a zipped version to solve the problem.
This problem really didn’t have much to do with MMPlayer itself, but Magnus still went the whole mile to solve my problem. Top-notch service.
.H1 Together we have…
Now you can see that by combining Pocket DVD Studio and MMPlayer, you can take your DVD movies, and other media files, on your handheld wherever you go. These two programs work so well together. It’s like they were made for each other.
The only problems I’ve found is that sometimes the appropriate subtitle track can be difficult to locate with Pocket DVD Studio, like I mentioned above, and the bookmark glitch with MMPlayer.
Rapid movement, like action sequences, has a tendency to pixelate. I don’t think that can be helped at any resolution considering the amount of dynamic memory, processor speed, and screen resolution of the devices they’re being played on.
Bear in mind that running a full-length movie on your handheld is going to be a pretty good power drain. I played one movie on my T2, starting with a fully charged battery. When the movie was finished, the battery had been run down to 41%. [I tried something similar on an old Jornada Pocket PC I took on a plane, and I only made it about 2/3 through the movie before I ran out of juice. — DG]
I’m going to rate each of these applications separately, because they each truly deserve it. They work so well together though, that it was kind of a given they had to be combined into one article.
.H1 Rating Pocket DVD Studio
Pocket DVD Studio earns a 3 out of 5 for being able to cram a full length DVD movie onto a 128 MB file, and still have it be viewable. Although it’s great that the file size always comes out smaller than the estimate, sometimes it came out so much smaller that I encoded the file again to get closer to the size my card could accommodate.
This product could have gotten a 4 out of 5, but after several different support inquiries over a period of three weeks, the only response I’ve ever received was in response to my initial contact for a review copy. Pocket DVD Studio definitely does what it’s supposed to, just don’t expect to get much help from the developers if you have a problem.
.RATING 3
.H1 Rating MMPlayer
MMPlayer I also give a 4 out of 5, primarily for being able to handle native media files, but also for the excellent support. As I mentioned above, the caching of the file, I think, causes the little bookmark glitch. One improvement I’d really like to see in a future version, and it may already be planned, is a time counter. That way, you could edit your bookmark to ensure the time stamp actually matches where you want to mark the file.
.RATING 4
With Pocket DVD Studio and MMPlayer, your media files can be as mobile as you are.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Pocket DVD Studio, visit http://www.pqdvd.com.
For more information on MMPlayer, visit http://www.mmplayer.com.
For more information on VirtualDub, visit http://www.virtualdub.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
