You Can Take It With You
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Due to the need to put less wear on my car, rising gasoline prices, and the lack of a campus parking permit, I've been riding the bus more frequently. (I know that environmental issues should be on the list, but honestly, I'd still be driving if I had dollar-fifty a gallon gasoline and a parking permit.)
I've always scoffed at those who install DVD players into their Cadillac Escalades and drive around talking on their cell-phones. Basically, I think people are trying to recreate their living rooms in their cars, and since I love driving for driving's sake, the thought of detaching myself from the pleasure of it leaves me perplexed.
On the bus, however, keeping occupied can be a problem. You can bring something to read, though the noise and vibration prevents you from getting any serious work done. Certainly it is impossible to use a notebook computer, the way you might on, say, commuter rail. In the past, I've brought magazines or novels or similar light reading with me. I bought a Rio MP3 player a few years back, and that does fine, too. But lately I have discovered a new commuting passion - watching movies on my PDA.
I was inspired by the new Sony PSP, for which commercially available movies are available and selling well. My PDA performs brilliantly as an eBook and RSS reader, considerably less so as an MP3 player, and my early experiments with video using the built-in Microsoft Media Player were disappointing at best. Consider my surprise when I found that encoding and viewing full-length video is a snap.
I have a Dell Axim X5, which was a processing powerhouse at the time I bought it. I have subsequently upgraded it to Windows Mobile 2003. It has a 400MHz XScale Processor (usually running at 200MHz), a 320x240 display, and 64MB of user RAM. Today, you can do better than that in all categories. I wasn't sure if my Axim could handle the video. I was afraid I'd have to tweak settings and fool around with arcane tools. Instead, I found a simple, and effective, means of encoding and viewing just about any video.
Encoding
PocketDivxEncoder At maximum settings (video: 360 kbps; audio: 128 kbps) you get a nice, viewable picture and satisfying sound. A 25-minute television episode fits in about 85-95 MB and a 48 minute episode fits in about 140-150 MB. I bought a 1 GB SD card for cheap, so I have lots of room for videos, MP3s, eBooks, etc. If you're space limited, I'd suggest skimping on video bitrate, and not going any lower than 96 kbps on the audio. I use two-pass filtering and do NOT use XviD, which seems to cause the encoder to crash in combination with the codecs I have installed.
One note: when encoding widescreen (16x9) video, you probably want to rethink the aspect ratio. With the device turned to landscape mode for full-screen viewing, the Pocket PCs visible aspect ratio is not 4x3 the way you might think given the native resolution. I'd suggest encoding 16x9 source material to 320x196, which gains some additional vertical detail and gives the final result a more correct aspect ratio on the Pocket PC's display.
Codecs (for your PC)
I like the K-Lite pack, which seems to be kept up-to-date, and has all the stuff you need to encode and watch anything and everything on your PC. (The Mega Pack includes Real Player and Quicktime support.)
Viewing
The Core Pocket Media Player is a great lightweight player that handles large, compressed video files well even when the PDA is on power-save mode. I wish it were intially a little more user friendly, but with some key remapping, you can get it to do most things you want.
Well, good luck. And happy viewing!
I've always scoffed at those who install DVD players into their Cadillac Escalades and drive around talking on their cell-phones. Basically, I think people are trying to recreate their living rooms in their cars, and since I love driving for driving's sake, the thought of detaching myself from the pleasure of it leaves me perplexed.
On the bus, however, keeping occupied can be a problem. You can bring something to read, though the noise and vibration prevents you from getting any serious work done. Certainly it is impossible to use a notebook computer, the way you might on, say, commuter rail. In the past, I've brought magazines or novels or similar light reading with me. I bought a Rio MP3 player a few years back, and that does fine, too. But lately I have discovered a new commuting passion - watching movies on my PDA.
I was inspired by the new Sony PSP, for which commercially available movies are available and selling well. My PDA performs brilliantly as an eBook and RSS reader, considerably less so as an MP3 player, and my early experiments with video using the built-in Microsoft Media Player were disappointing at best. Consider my surprise when I found that encoding and viewing full-length video is a snap.
I have a Dell Axim X5, which was a processing powerhouse at the time I bought it. I have subsequently upgraded it to Windows Mobile 2003. It has a 400MHz XScale Processor (usually running at 200MHz), a 320x240 display, and 64MB of user RAM. Today, you can do better than that in all categories. I wasn't sure if my Axim could handle the video. I was afraid I'd have to tweak settings and fool around with arcane tools. Instead, I found a simple, and effective, means of encoding and viewing just about any video.
Encoding
PocketDivxEncoder At maximum settings (video: 360 kbps; audio: 128 kbps) you get a nice, viewable picture and satisfying sound. A 25-minute television episode fits in about 85-95 MB and a 48 minute episode fits in about 140-150 MB. I bought a 1 GB SD card for cheap, so I have lots of room for videos, MP3s, eBooks, etc. If you're space limited, I'd suggest skimping on video bitrate, and not going any lower than 96 kbps on the audio. I use two-pass filtering and do NOT use XviD, which seems to cause the encoder to crash in combination with the codecs I have installed.
One note: when encoding widescreen (16x9) video, you probably want to rethink the aspect ratio. With the device turned to landscape mode for full-screen viewing, the Pocket PCs visible aspect ratio is not 4x3 the way you might think given the native resolution. I'd suggest encoding 16x9 source material to 320x196, which gains some additional vertical detail and gives the final result a more correct aspect ratio on the Pocket PC's display.
Codecs (for your PC)
I like the K-Lite pack, which seems to be kept up-to-date, and has all the stuff you need to encode and watch anything and everything on your PC. (The Mega Pack includes Real Player and Quicktime support.)
Viewing
The Core Pocket Media Player is a great lightweight player that handles large, compressed video files well even when the PDA is on power-save mode. I wish it were intially a little more user friendly, but with some key remapping, you can get it to do most things you want.
Well, good luck. And happy viewing!
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home