myMovo: Video Downloading & Transcoding for Mobile Devices

[Jason Dunn]

<em>&quot;myMovo is an innovative new way to search, download and convert videos from the internet to your PC, portable media player (iPod, PSP, Zen, and Zune) , cell phone (Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung) or Pocket PC. myMovo performs a targeted search of top videos sites including YouTube, ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox, mySpaceTV, MTV, Yahoo! and more.&quot;<br /><br /></em>&nbsp;<img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/movo_logo_alpha.jpg" alt="" /> <br /><br />Taking a brief walk-through of the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mymovo.com/help/help.html">features on the help page</a>, myMovo looks like an extremely feature-rich application. It's essentially a software tool that allows you to capture remote or local video (streaming or files) and convert it to portable device-friendly formats. Some of the supported devices include the Apple iPod and iPhone, Creative Zen Vision, Pocket PC (and by extension, I'd assume Smartphones), the Microsoft Zune, and others. As with all rich applications, there's so much there it's hard to wrap your brain around it all at once - any myMovo users out there care to share with us what they think of the program?

[boeinguy2]

I thought that this looked great and was worth giving it a try. I got some podcasts and that worked well.

However two issues. First is the app itself. The longer it runs, the slower my computer gets. I set up to get copies of Jericho episodes from CBS. Each episode is in 5 parts, mmaking a list of about 110 items. If I tried to submit the whole list my system slowed down to such a crawl, I finally had to doa forced shutdown. I tried limiting the list to 6 parts, and the system slowed considerably, but was still able to performa normal shutdown. Once the app is stopped the system contiues to run slowly.

Second issue is that the ability to actuyally get files is limited, at least for TV. Out of the list from Cbs, I got 5 parts. Three from one episode, one each from two other episodes. Nothing else will download, I have tried for three straight days.

My system has a 1.7 Mhz processor, 2 Gigs of ram, tons of free hard drive space, 128 megs of video ram. I am working with a DSL connection that runs at a reasonable rate. Maybe this is not enough to make it work, I do not know.

I like the idea, but it is not working well yet.

[boeinguy2]

So I have continued to wqrk with MyMovo. I have found a few things that woirk great and that help the issues.

First, Podcasts, Sports, PBS stuff all work great. CBS seems to have the most issues. Hve noit tried ABC.

Second, the speed issue is really processor dependent. I tried doing this on my wife's PC with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor, and it does work better. Still cannot run much in the background but considerably better than my 1.7 Ghz Celeron. (Both have 2 Gigs of RAM and 128 megs of Video. As a matter of fact my wife's PC has shared memory for video.)

Third, I limited the number of files to work on and the whole thing runs faster. Trying to process a list of 110 files (CBS breaks each episode of Jericho into 5 parts) slows everything down considerably, even if there is only one thread being downloaded at a time. Creating a list of only 3 to 5 files speeds things up greatly.

Fourth, If I downloaded 3 or 4 ESPN baseball files then a file from a CBS Jericho episode, the CBS file worked about 80% of the time. If I reversed this, the CBS file never starts. This is far better than the less than 5% of the files that I got trying to access a list of CBS only files. Maybe something in the way MyMovo reads ahead?

I did get a great documentary in four parts from PBS, and some other stuff. This is great, now how to get a better success rate with CBS.