I searched for a thread related to this subject , but was surprised not to find anything related ! I have a Palm Tungsten T , & I use mainly kinoma player to watch movies on my pda , but the thing is , most of the movies I download ( mainly through kazaa ) are in a format that kinoma producer can not use ( basically to change it to a format kinoma player understands ) as it is only allowed to use certain codecs not more . Therefore , my question is how can I change my movies ( mainly in avi format ) to make them smaller and change thier format into one that kinoma producer understands ? I don't know exactly which formats kinoma producer really understands fully , as it recognises some mpeg & some avi formats but can not convert them into pda format ( which is the part that really confuses me )! When it comes to these things I am a beginner unfortunately and in need of major help ! I would appreciate any advise in this matter ! & thank you !
As far as I know, PalmOS doesn't have MPEG-4/DivX5 compatible players at all and the player that you mentioned, Kinoma, seems to use its own format and container for which you need to buy their own encoder in order to re-encode (thus weakening the video and audio quality) to Kinoma's own format in order to play them on Palm. For PocketPC there's PocketMVP that plays DivX and XviD encoded videos as well as MPEG-1 (such as VCD) videos just fine (although full-screen DivX movies take too much resources and can't be watched at the current CPU levels that PDAs have -- not even with XScale PXA-255 400@566MHz. But re-encoded CIF-sized, 320x240, DivX clips play very well on PXA255 400MHz PocketPCs).
Unfortunately , I don't have a pocket pc at the moment , and it would be quite expensive for me to buy one right now . But I did find a new palm operated movie player called "mmplayer" that plays divx and mpeg ! Therefore , I wish to know how to change the movies I have into such a small size that it would fit in my external card and still have enough quality to look good , you know ? & I think that this site most probably would have the best information about this subject !
As I can't say what is the "critical point" for that player and your PDA, i.e. what is the bitrate and resolution that your PDA will play, I would say that you simply need to test it. That's what I did with my PPC -- spent good 8hrs of encoding one 5min clip about gazillion times with different bitrates and resolutions and audios. I don't know your Palm's CPU -- my HP 5450 has PXA250 processor with standard clock at 400MHz, which AFAIK, is the same that new Palms use, but obviously memory addressing and graphic processor make difference as well. Anyway, best way to test this is to use VirtualDub and DivX5. Use the "original 1-pass" encoding, set the bitrate to, for example, 200kbps for video and resize, by using VirtualDub's resize filter, the video to your screen's resolution (probably 320x240) and flip the video 90 degress (i.e. to get it in "landscape mode"), again using VDub's filters. To get the idea on how to use VDub's settings, filters, etc -- read our DVD to DivX (anamorphic) guide to get a rough idea on how it works. As an input file, obviously, you take some of your existing files, like DivX movies or something.
This subject is explored this month in Maximum PC magazine, with an easy to follow how-to guide on how to get and convert the movies you want to watch. I am in no way related to Maximum PC, but fervently suggest that anyone part with the $12 subscription price for 12 issues!
Well , Kinoma Producer 2 solved the problem , so if you have a palm , I strongly suggest it , it works fine !
