For anyone how has played movies/video clips

[Orangeaid]

Well if you have played a movie/video clip how is it? What software did you use windows media player, pocket tv, pocketdivx? what were the results?

[GoldKey]

Played a BMW film using the built in media player on the 400mhz model. Looked and sounded great to me. As a test, reduced the speed of the unit to 200 mhz and still looked/sounded fine.

[erikadams]

I have two .wma files in my documents but i cant get them to play. Any suggestions?

[Jhokur2k]

I have played both divx and wma files (pocket divx & media player) and both play superb - the divx ran smoother and larger than the wma files (which were also the bmw films.. why are they so small?). I have also played a couple mp3's, and didn't sound too bad from the speaker, but sounded awesome from the headphones. Now I'm on to compressing down some of my dvd's to divx to play from CF :)

[Jellicle911]

Jhokur2k --What is the size of your divx movies? I've never tried making divx before, but I might start doing so.

Orangeaid -- I just got my axim today. I'll try it later. Yesterday I made a mpeg 30 clip from analog TV at a resolution of 320x240 at a fairly low quality rate, and I'll see what it looks like on the Dell. The file size I made is about 120 mb, but from there I'll tweak it after I check the quality, cause that's still pretty big.

I ordered a 512 mb CF card for $100 total after rebate so I'm happy, but I will be looking for more ways to compress media.

[jk]

I just went to microsoft's pocket pc site and found the windows media encoder 7.1 After converting a 700mb divx movie to mpeg using tmpgenc and using the compaq ipaq template (given by Microsoft along with the encoder) I was able to shrink the whole thing (1hour 40min) down to a 165mb .wmv file. It looks crystal on my desktop but I don't have my axim yet to try it out!

[Jhokur2k]

I haven't compressed any of my own yet, been downloading the trailers on a few sites... for instance the trailer for Minority Report is 1:21 long, and is 2.4MB in size, I think they are 320x224 res.

[jk]

I noticed different movie sites have different sizes for videos. Some being around 208x160 and others being around 320x240. I wonder which is the best. I would assume bigger the better but what is the full screen size?

[Jhokur2k]

well, being that the screen is 240x320, or 320x240 in landscape, that would be full size - letterbox should be 320x180.

[jk]

See that strikes me as odd now...the template mircrosoft supplied for the ipaq was 208x160...why wouldn't they use 320x240 instead? I wonder how much bigger the file will be at 320. I guess I have to just do both and see which works better. Now if my Axim could get here...

[Jhokur2k]

Heh I found out why - b/c at 320x240, the file isn't big (118MB for an entire dvd), but the encoding puts a huge strain on the CPU, and it turned my video into a slide show :) I'll have to re-encode it tonight at 208x160, 104K.

[jk]

Was this a Divx file or a .wmv? Suprisingly I rencoded the movie the same way using 320x240 this time and it was only 1 meg or so bigger. It will be intresting to see which plays better. From what you said though the 208 seems logical.

[Orangeaid]

Well my topic has become mildy popular! Anyway is there a requirment to the size on your ppc like if can you reajust it so it fits right on there or can it only be so big or it wont work?

[spursdude]

My method will work on any Windows XP machine, without having to download more software:

-Open up Windows Movie Maker (it came preinstalled with Windows XP).
-Import the video file you want to use (mpeg, avi, whatever) Make sure that you don't check "Create Clips for Video Files" unless you want to actually edit the video along with converting (clip making will take significantly longer to import)
-Drag the video clip to the filmstrip at the bottom of the window. You can now edit the video if you want, or just hit "Save Movie."
-Change your playback quality to Other, and set your profile to "Video for Color PDA devices," and choose whichever one suits you best.
-Hit OK, then Save, then wait for quite a whiles. (as in a few hours for a whole movie, perhaps)
-When the conversion is done, you have a nice little WMV file waiting for you.

When I use full-screen for color PDA, a 45 minute video ends up at around 60-70MB.

I haven't ever really fully used Windows Media Encoder - my experimentation with it left me with a bad impression - it wouldn't accept a lot of video clips, and it was quite buggy.

My way works consistently, although I don't know how it compares speed-wise to other methods.

[jk]

Yeah the windows media encoder wouldn't except a divx file but I converted the divx using tmpgenc. The cool thing was the windows media encoder chewed through the movie (1 hour 40 min) in about 30 min on my work pc 1.6ghz 128megs of ram. I was impressed with the final result...it looks almost as good as the original divx at a smaller size. The 165mb is nice too! I don't know...I have always found divx a pain to work with. I also found a tmpgenc template for mpeg that took that movie and made it very blocky and the file was 300+megs. I don't know so far the windows media encoder impressed me but I would like to try the movie maker way as well. Spursdude...what is the end resolution when you do it that way? Is it around 320x240 or smaller?

[spursdude]

i usually do 320x240...full screen.

[Pony99CA]

I ordered a 512 mb CF card for $100 total after rebate so I'm happy, but I will be looking for more ways to compress media.
I've seen 512 MB CF cards for about $130 after rebates, but how did you get it for $100? Was this the Viking card at Amazon using the $30 coupon? If you have a link, I bet others would like that.

Steve (who already has bought one for about $115 from Amazon)