How to Watch Movies and Videos on Your Windows Mobile Smartphone
Posted by Jon Lee in Entertainment, How-to, tags: free, movie, smartphone, videos, Windows-Mobile
With all the iPhone news lately, it could be easy to forget that the vast majority of Smartphones and Pocket PCs on the market right now are running Windows Mobile. I personally have a one-year old i-mate SP5 (HTC Tornado) that runs Windows Mobile 5.
One of my favorite things to do on it is watch videos and movies. And with the whole slew of Windows Mobile 6 devices that are coming out, I think it’s reasonable to assume most people would like to do the same.
Software
The best software for playing videos is completely free The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP). It supports pretty much every image and video format imaginable (including DivX encoding) and is not memory hungry compared to Windows Media Player. This is important on these devices which typically have 128 megs of RAM or less. It offers a lot of features including rotation, zoom, rendering options etc. However, to the best of my knowledge it does not support subtitles. For some unsupported formats, there are plug-ins available but it will have a slight impact on performance. The TCPMP site is now defunct but here’s a mirror to download the latest version.
Encoding
Regardless of how much storage your Smartphone or Pocket PC has, copying any regular video file to it does not make sense since your phone will have to scale it to its screen resolution. This is why you should always encode your video files to your device’s default screen resolution in order to make the most efficient use of the storage you have as well as maximizing quality. Yes this means you iPhone users as well!
I use PocketDivXEncoder to accomplish this task. It lets you set the desired resolution as well as video and audio quality (tradeoff with file size). It can even rotate the video for you in case your device doesn’t rotate it automatically. The encoding process isn’t fast by any means and is dependent on your computer speed. For me to encode a regular full length movie (700 megs) to QVGA 320×240 resolution takes anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. The resulting file is about 200 megs. Since PocketDivXEncoder supports encoding multiple files, I usually encode large batches of videos overnight.
Putting the Two Together
After encoding your video, you need to put the movie or video on to your smartphone or Pocket PC. To do this, simply copy it over to your device (via ActiveSync or built-in support with Vista) and fire it up with TCPMP. Did I mention both programs are completely free?
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