MPEG - AVI's Etc On Pocket PC

[rustoni]

After reading through this month's stuff magazine i saw the new Archos Av300 which has a 4 inch screen and plays video and Mp3 etc and has a 20gb hard drive attached and i thought that this was a neat idea and maybe i could use my ageing Ipaq to perform a similar function ?

I do a lot of traveling and thought maybe i could purchase a 1gb Compact flash card to store a movie on to break the monotany of the journey a little, but i don't want to splach out for a large card (around £100) unless i know it will work ok. So has anyone hear used a third party app to watch video on their ipaq and is it possible to watch it sideways on ala widescreen or sort of ?
How much video could i cram on a 1gb CF card ? and what is the quality like ?

[plotloss]

You can get Divx for Pocket PC so I dont see why not.

A 90 minute film is about 650mb as I remember so you would have enough space on a 1Gb card for 1 movie and about 5 hours of MP3 music.

[judas]

I'm a bit behind on what's going on with this kind of stuff on the Pocket PC as I gave up on it a while ago, but you can watch AVI videos using Pocket PC's Media Player. There's also an app called Pocket TV for watching MPEG movies. I have a few movies reduced in size for playback on my Ipaq, but it's not great. Don't even think of trying to watch anything full screen in high quality mode - the processors aren't fast enough and you'll end up getting less than 1fps.

[squirrelz]

I'm not convinced the battery would last for a full film, would it?

[Robertuk]

MPEG - Divx and more

A quick guide.

A CD can hold music or data.
Each CD holds roughly 650MB

So a music CD which holds ten songs,
so roughly speaking each song is then 65MB.
(650 is ten songs, so one song is 650 divided by ten)

Downloading that on a modem or even broadband would take a while and take up alot of space on a users hard disk. Now some computer gurus got together and found a way of squezzing (compressing) the size down.
This 65 MB song file became an mp3 file and was 6.5 MB
(roughly a tenth of the size).

This is more easy to download.

The song can then be played back on special players
or the computer itself.
The computer uncompresses the song and plays it back at the same time.

DivX or MPEG4 does this for VIDEO files.
(so its like MP3 for video)

But as the video is compressed and video files are much larger, you need a very fast computer to watch the film. The beauty is product showreels and promos can be left on the net for your customers to view.

Now most PDAs can play back .mp3 audio files but used to struggle to play DivX compressed video files.

I think the gurus are working on it and there are a number of players (for PALM /Pocket PC) for different PDAs.

A popular Divx player is OpenDivx,
the webpage is :

www.projectmayo.com/

Check out the links on the right for the latest downloads/updates/info.

I think theres some info here:





>> Edited by Robertuk on Thursday 17th July 15:26

[jvaughan]

I have a 1 GB Card for my Pocket PC (iPAQ 3975) and can get a good quality DIVX on to it, and about 125 MP3's too

Fol;m is aprox 700 Meg .. mp3's vairy from 2.5 meg 4 meg each

>> Edited by jvaughan on Thursday 17th July 23:28

[Robertuk]

The Compaq IPAQ 3975 has a

400 MHz Intel X-Scale processor and 64 MB SDRAM.

The Aston of the PDA world...so video /audio performance would be very good.

Most PDAs currentl have half that speed I think
(around 200MHz)

[rich-uk]

I've got Pocket TV on my Smartphone (Orange SVP) and it works fine, so it should be fine for watching films on a Pocket PC sized screen.

[alan_driver]

I have just put divx on my pocket pc and it says its not a valid windows ce application