The Tungsten PDA

Now that we know that our Palm may well serve as a portable multimedia player, it's time to learn to convert our video files to a format and features suitable for her.

Based on the video file you want, the process is to recode using a lower resolution (fewer pixels wide and high), since a higher resolution than our PDA can show it will be wasting space and storage capacity. It also tends to reduce the rate of images per second, effect on a small screen that shows little, but dramatically reduces the information store. With all this, get the resulting file will be much smaller than the original.

To carry out this task, we will use VirualDub, a utility to capture and video processing, use of free and open, released under the GPL. There is a very detailed tutorial to make the conversion, published in PDAExpertos. You can find it here.

VirtualDub is a program of comprehensive video processing

In addition to the VirtualDub, which is the program that helps us to work with the videos, we also need codecs, which is software that really takes care of our video processing. According to the format in which you want to compress, either DivX (owner), Xvid (free), etc, we need to have installed the appropriate codecs on our team. PDAExpertos recommended in the K-Lite Codec Pack, which incidentally I have used for years, and lets you despreocuparte the topic of formats, as it supports all audio and video that will surely necesiteis in life. Once you have completed the conversion process (depending on your machine may be delayed enough), copy the resulting file to our PDA, using any of the methods that have already commented.

With the movie stored on our Palm, and only remains to install a player. I strongly recommend TCPMP (odd name comes from The Core Pocket Media Player), that is, as always attempted, free software and free. We also unconcerned using TCPMP of formats, as it supports a suite of them. Extracted from its documentation:

  Cabinet supported: 
  - AVI (*. avi) 
  - Matroska (*. mkv, *. mka) 
  - MP4 (*. mp4, *. m4a) 
  - Ogg Media (*. ogg, *. gm) 
  - ASF (*. asf) 

  Supported audio codecs: 
  - MPEG 1 Layer III 
  - Ogg Vorbis 
  - Musepack 
  - Windows Media Audio (on Windows Mobile devices) 
  - AC-3 
  - AMR 
  - Adpcm, ulaw 

  Supported video codecs: 
  - DivX 
  - XviD 
  - MPEG4-SP (and support for B-frame) 
  - MPEG1 
  - M-JPEG 
  - Windows Media Video (on Windows Mobile devices) 

We install the main program together with the corresponding prc files, and we already have everything you need to view our video. In case of having a PDA with 320x480 resolution can be rotated 90 degrees for the film to fully exploit the screen. Whether the screen is square (like my Tungsten E2, with 320x320 pixels), logically you might not.

TCPMP plays a large quantity of audio and video formats

Just remember is that video playback is a task that requires a lot of CPU, so in a PDA is not very recent, that the image can go a little jumps. The solution is in play with the bitrate (quality) with which encode the video. We will have to go testing, bajándola until demos with a bit rate at which our Palm puedasin problems. The same goes for the audio quality. However, as a reference, in my E2 with 200MHz processor, video can be seen perfectly still encoded with a lot of quality.

And now, I hope you enjoy watching your movies on the subway or bus, or anywhere you have a free moment, because that's the beauty of a PDA, you came with all parties to use it without problem when it's needed. As always, doubts the points that have not been clear, do not hesitate to bring them in the comments.

Published: Zapan reminds me, in comments, a very useful program to convert video files, called PocketDivX Encoder. I used it once and it is very useful, but to write this post by mistake me, I thought I had become payment program. I see that it is not. I encourage you to try.

Published: it seems like the creators of it turned TCPMP have a player of payment, the page of TCPMP has disappeared. For those who qiuieran done with TCPMP what I uploaded to my server: download TCPMP 0.72 RC1.

Posts in this series:

• Enjoy your portable media player Palm (R)
• Enjoy your portable media player Palm (II)

By: Mark Gonzalez Troyes in Analysis
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