My latest toy, which I purchased at the PalmSource Developer Conference 2004, is a Tapwave Zodiac 2. It’s a handheld optimized for gaming, which means fast video and great audio. And, incidentally, movies.
The Zodiac comes with a stripped-down copy of Kinoma Player, with Kinoma Producer on the desktop for converting files. Kinoma Player isn’t bad if you’ve already got your video in Kinoma format, but waiting for Kinoma Producer to convert even a small movie (say, 320×480, only a minute in length) is a five minute or longer process. I want to watch movies now, and I just don’t have the patience to wait for one of the slowest video conversion tools in existence to do its thing. This will not do.
After a bit of Googling, I ran across MMPlayer, which plays native format MPEG and AVI video, along with MP3 and WAV audio, on Palm OS 5 handhelds. I remember playing with MMPlayer a while back on my CLIÉ NX70V, but it was a very early version and didn’t do a whole lot back then. It’s a totally different animal now, with support for a variety of codecs, including the very efficient and mostly ubiquitous DivX.
I also ran across Converting Movies For Viewing on a Tapwave Zodiac with MMPlayer Video Encoding for the Tapwave Zodiac, an excellent guide to using Virtualdub to make DivX videos optimized for the Zodiac’s screen size. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet (it’s already past my bed time as it is), but it looks like a very complete set of instructions.
Good conversion instructions aside, I’ve already tossed some MPEG video I’ve got lying around onto the Zodiac, and it worked like a charm in MMPlayer, even without any optimization for the Zodiac’s screen size. MMPlayer goes on my list of really great Palm OS software titles.
I’m looking forward to converting some anime I’ve got lying around into something I can view on the handheld. I just don’t watch movies on my PC, not when that keyboard and mouse are beckoning for some kind of input. I can see myself watching bits of a show on a handheld, though.
UPDATE [2004-03-02 17:33] Unfortunately, the guide linked to above no longer exists; the link goes to the front page of the site. Google hasn’t been able to retrieve the page for me, either, and there isn’t any contact information on sumoforce.com, so I can’t ask the owner of the site what happened to the page. I find this irksome, because it really was a useful guide.
UPDATE [2004-04-14 10:41] The author of the conversion guide mailed me with a link to an updated page. The udpated guide is even better than the original, and includes helpful screen shots of the whole process. Thank you, Superdork.
