Windows Media Player 9 Series for the Pocket PC - Awesome Performance!

[Jason Dunn]

I don't even know if that's technically the correct name for the app that ships with Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PCs, but I wanted to give Microsoft credit where credit is due. I'm heading out of town to visit some friends this weekend, and they haven't seen our dog Keiko yet. Like a good "parent" I took some video footage on my GL2 as our puppy was growing up. But being the time-challenged person I am, I didn't have the time or desire to manually edit the video into a masterpiece - so I just fed it through <a href="http://www.muvee.com/?promo=jdunn">the amazing Muvee</a> and got a cute little video to show them. I'm testing the iPAQ 1940, and was curious about the performance of the 266 mHZ Samsung ARM processor in it. How much power does it really have?<br /><br />I also heard about WMP9 being able to handle fairly high bit rates, so I was curious to know if the 256 Kbps preset in Windows Media Encoder 9 was overly conservative. It was! I manually changed the encoding parameters to devote a full 300 Kbps just for video, and 64 Kbps for the audio. I also bumped up the frames per second to 24 from 20, and the results are excellent! The 1940 was able to play back the video without any problems at all, and the extra 100 Kbps or so devoted to the video makes the quality noticeably better. I plan to push it even higher when I get back - this Samsung CPU is impressive for only 266 Mhz! And kudos to Microsoft for radically improving the performance of WMP when it comes to video - they really worked some magic with the code.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/keiko.wmv">Check out the video for yourself</a> (1.78 MB), and if you have a Pocket PC 2003 device, try it out - the quality is great!

[Corn]

Sounds good. Does anyone know how well it performs with higher bitrate music over a wireless lan? Does it still pause to buffer music every couple seconds like the previous version?

[AKBishop]

Cute dog. Now maybe I have a reason to convince my wife that we need a dv camera. It's for the dog! :-)

[SeanJ]

Hmm, I not exactly overwelmed by this performance.

I use PocketTV Pro on an Ipaq 3600 to view a large collection of video clips which I shot on miniDV, uploaded onto my notebook, then transcoded to mpeg using Tsunami. It took a considerable amount of time playing around with all the different encoding parameters to get the best performance. I don't have the exact settings to hand at this moment, but using PocketTv to view the properties of one of my video-clips shows;-
audio bitrate: 64Kb
video bitrate: variable
total bitrate: 1,073Kb
frames: 25/sec
size: 240x176
The clips all play wonderfully smooth and sharp, even on the 4096 colours of the ipaq 3600.

[NeilE]

Anyone else think this article was just an excuse for Jason to show us all his puppy? :D

[ghostppc]

Anyone else think this article was just an excuse for Jason to show us all his puppy? :D

But Keiko's a cutie so excuse well used :)

[MasterOfMoo]

:?:
OK, now can someone give me the name of the track he has playing along with the video? The song sounds familiar, but it's driving me nuts trying to remember the title.

tnx in advance!

Moo

[LarDude]

Jason,

If I recall, I believe you also played with the 2215 (?). Overall
for video, how does the 1940 compare with the 2215? Does
one feel "snappier" than the other?

[Citezein]

Don't mean to shout, just wanted to be noticed! The mime-type for the wmv file is not set correctly. I believe it is set to text/plain, and as a result, the video shows up as garbage in Mozilla. This needs to be fixed on your web server. I'm not an apache person, so I can't tell you how to do it, but "wmv" should map to a mime-type of: "video/x-ms-wmv"

Likewise, wma files should be "audio/x-ms-wma"

Please fix this so us non-ie users can easily see the video. In fact, IE does it wrong, it is ignoring the mime-type sent out by your server.

Thanks!

Brian

[bruceo]

It plays these settings on the 22xx nicely in regular mode, but unacceptable in full screen. I am in the video business and so far after years of testing and experience, for actual video playback quality in full screen the newest version of Pocket MVP is the winner. Pocket TV's operation is more stable, but even the PTVpro version's playback is of considerably less quality than PMVP.

[jmbneaf]

Tried it on My e755 w/ WM2003

The results were just great in full screen and in normal view.....

No complaints here at all.

Thanks for the heads up Jason.

-JB

PS: cute puppy!

[danmanmayer]

How i do love better playing video. This is nice to hear. Any progress towards better video is a big bonus for me.

[theone3]

Anyone else think this article was just an excuse for Jason to show us all his puppy? :DYup. but on the other hand.. Awwwww..

[ctmagnus]

320kbps MP3 @ 48kHz! :rock on dude!:

This is the device/os/software I've been waiting for. If I had unlimited storage, I could replace my NJB3 with my 5550.

[rmasinag]

I must be a WMP virgin b/c I cant get WMP9 to play any of the mpegs I had :( My H3135 just didn't look good for videos so I didn'y bother then.

I think PMVP suck when cahce is turned on

I like pocketTV very very much

Can someone enlighten me on how to get my mpegs to play in WMP9

I have to say the 2210...to word it by MaxPC...Kickass! :mrgreen:

[Dave Beauvais]

Can someone enlighten me on how to get my mpegs to play in WMP9 ...
You can't -- WMP can only play video in Windows Media formats.

--Dave

[Pocket PC Dubai]

I would like to know how you can keep the backlight always ON during WMP9 playback without changing the windows settings, just like PocketTV.. Is it possible anyway?
:|

[racerx]

It plays these settings on the 22xx nicely in regular mode, but unacceptable in full screen. I am in the video business and so far after years of testing and experience, for actual video playback quality in full screen the newest version of Pocket MVP is the winner. Pocket TV's operation is more stable, but even the PTVpro version's playback is of considerably less quality than PMVP.
Interesting that you should say that. I just installed Pocket MVP yesterday on my 5555 and set it to play MPEGs as well as AVIs. Already had Pocket TV Pro on my unit, so I was interested in what would play better; was going to uninstall Pocket TV if MVP did a decent job. Same file ran great under PTVP, but was very "stuttery" under MVP. Could be just the file, but that's been my experience.

[ppcsurfr]

Hmm, I not exactly overwelmed by this performance.

I use PocketTV Pro on an Ipaq 3600 to view a large collection of video clips which I shot on miniDV, uploaded onto my notebook, then transcoded to mpeg using Tsunami. It took a considerable amount of time playing around with all the different encoding parameters to get the best performance. I don't have the exact settings to hand at this moment, but using PocketTv to view the properties of one of my video-clips shows;-
audio bitrate: 64Kb
video bitrate: variable
total bitrate: 1,073Kb
frames: 25/sec
size: 240x176
The clips all play wonderfully smooth and sharp, even on the 4096 colours of the ipaq 3600.

The thing about MPEG-1 is that there isn't any achievement involved since it is not a highly compressed file as compared to a WMV file.

The thing here is the file size... Good 24fps on a really small file size.

And the convenience of not adding a 3rd party app.

MPEG-1 is good... but WMV is something which I want to see improved... which it has been.

Mabuhay! ~ Carlo

[MultiMatt]

My test was to use a clip that I previously tried to play on my 5450, in which the video was super-choppy. It's a news clip about this guy Bubb Rubb:
http://homepage.mac.com/howheels/rubpics/woowoo.wmv
Which is then supposed to be followed up, by a funny Flash parody of Bubb:
http://lisupras.com/wooo.html

I had the Flash part on my 5450, but without being able to show someone the video first, it wasn't as funny.

In Media Player 9, the video plays really well!

Now I can show Bubb Rubb to all my friends, wherever I may be!
:rock on dude!:

Matt

[that_kid]

I'm watching a 700kilobit video stream from my snapstream server with no porblems at all. If I tried this with my 5450 and wmp 8.5 I would be looking at a picture slideshow. I also streamed a 1.2 megabit file to my 5555 but at that high rate the video was about a 1/2 second after the audio. Still not bad at all considering the bandwidth I was using. Now I don't have to transcode my shows in order to watch them on my pocketpc(unless I want to stream it across my sprint card).

[cyclwestks]

I didn't have a 1940, so after I read this post I went out and bought one just so I could see your puppy, & I will say soo far I am pretty impressed.

I hope when you review it you will test out the bluetooth, so I'll have to go get one of those too.

[jeffmd]

WMV is nice for very very low bit rates. Great streaming medium. How ever as a choice of video format for pocket pc, for me, it is not. Divx all the way. I can do 320x240 (thats full screen) video at 15fps or 30fps depending on if I make my audio stream sound like crap, or cd quality (audio is ogg format btw, better then mp3). Video bitrate I settle on is 350Kbits, audio is either 32kbit mono or 128kbit stereo, though if its not a music video, I lower it to 96 or 80kbyte stereo, which is the same quality as a 128kbit mp3.

[Mexico]

The Keiko video uses the Windows Media Video V8 video codec.

While converting Men in Black from MPG to WMV, I noticed that the V8 codec made the blacks rather grayish. The WMV9 codec took longer, but blacks looked much better. Has anybody else noticed this? What are other obvious advantages of using the WMV9 codec?

Also, what is the difference in quality between using the WMV9 codec and the plain MPEG4 codec?

Thanks for your help.

Manuel

[ctmagnus]

While converting Men in Black from MPG to WMV, I noticed that the V8 codec made the blacks rather grayish.

I'm sure Will Smith would be proud of that. :wink:

[coxgreen]

I recently lost WMP from my hp4155. I cannot find an HP disk (although I think I remember getting one) and I cannot load v7.0 as it is not compatible with PocketPC 2002.

Can anyone provide my a link or a zip file so that I can reload WMP 9 series to my Pocket PC (Microsoft's link is only for upgrade to existing which my system is not finding).

Any help is greatly appreciated! Still waiting to hear from HP...

Coxgreen