Get a big memory card - movies coming to a PPC near you!

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992428">http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992428</a><br /><br />"Air travellers will be able to download feature films and computer games to a handheld computer using a service to be launched first at US airports this summer. Customers will be able to insert their computer's removable memory card or chip into slots in the kiosks, to download films, music, games, electronic books and newspapers. "Each location can choose what content they would like," says a spokesman for nREACH, the US company behind the idea."<br /><br />They are figuring 1MB per minute of movie time, so a 2 hr movie <b><i>might</i></b> fit on a 128MB memory card, which we all know only has 122MB of usable space. This appears to be a sale too, not a rental, so count on $10-$30 for most movies. It would be nice if they could encode a 14 day expiration on the film and charge $3-$5 for it. View it as many times as you like on the trip then discard it.

[kinged]

$10 or more per movie is just too expensive and the downloading time will be too long. It would be cheaper to buy a portable DVD player.

[donkthemagicllama]

The movies would have to be on the order of $1-$2 to justify the low quality. As someone else stated, I'm pretty sure you can get a portable DVD player for like $300US now, which would be a lot more flexible.

[nox]

As far as I know Solid state memory like Compact flash is not an XRAYS best friend , security features at airports may disrupt data. I wonder how long the movie will last in these conditions

[Ed Hansberry]

Download time is minimal. According to the article, you insert your memory card into a kiosk and it copies it over. I would say 2 minutes MAX for a 128MB file.

As for xrays - my CF's and SD's have gone through dozens of X-Ray machines in the last 12 months. Absolutely no problems with some of the files that have been on there the entire time.

[leximaea]

That SOUNDS great and all, but I find the battery life on my iPaq (3565) pitiful...esp. when accessing a backlit screen (set to low) and a CF card (SanDisk). Rental price isn't as big an issue if I know that after 2 hours, my iPaq will be on it's last legs and I need to find my hotel and rental car reservation info, directions to the hotel, and all the other incidental uses my iPaq is used for. Grrrr.

[Tom Eichers]

I have encoded some movies for a friend (his dvd's) to his Toshiba 5gb hdd, he just got back from Mexico, he watched 2 full length DVD movies and 3 episodes of Enterprise on the trip. He also uses a external battery pack AAA type, he loves watching movies on flights. I get a movie down to about 550 mb, he likes the quality and not so concerned about file size. but 10 bucks is way too much, and I wonder about the quality at that file size.

[Jason Dunn]

I get a movie down to about 550 mb

Whoa, what format are you using? An average 2 hour DVD should be no more than 400 to 450 megs in MPEG1 format... :D

[Tom Eichers]

:lol: Yea - but the friend that I go this for, likes the better quality. Not to concerned with small size, with a 5 gig drive :) .

He shows the movies off when he visits his accounts and they are amazed that they can watch a full length movie on a iPaq. They actually hide their palms when he asks if they can watch movies on theirs :D . Great advertisment for Pocket PC's.