Movies on iPaq

[RedBaronK]

I am thinking about upgrading from a Palm M505 because of its lack of multimedia capabilities, and I was wondering if its possible to play movies on iPaqs if i get a 1 gig compact flash drive and transfer a 800mb movie from my desktop onto that to watch it using the windows media player that comes with pocket PC on iPaqs. is this possible? can the media player on iPaqs do anything that normal windows media players do?

[AnswerDude]

Short answer is yes it can, but the ipaq probably can't handle the same high bit rates as the desktop version. You probably need to reduce the dimension and the bit rate. You also have 2 more program that can handle video.
Pockettv
http://www.mpegtv.com/wince/pockettv/
Pocketdivx
http://www.projectmayo.com/projects/detail.php?projectId=9
http://home.adelphia.net/~mdukette/downloads.html

[daverules]

you probably don't even need to get a 1GB card. Others get away with much less.

When encoding you must realize that although the pocketpcs have nice screens, they're nowhere close to that of desktops. So you can gut the quality by quite a bit without noticing. Hack away half of the frames, and play around with the compression rates and you can get a full movie onto a 256MB card, easily.

I recommend Pocket Divx. I've been playing around with it a bit and was able to get a 20min video down to about 17MB (It was a 250MB MPEG before). If I can do that, only with a 120min movie, I'm only looking at about 102MB.

The Project Mayo website that AnswerDude gave you has a really good forum, check it out. The people there are doing some pretty cool things.

take a look at this guide from BetaBoy (http://www.moosegate.com/betaboy/dcdivx/Encode_DivX_video_for_the_PocketPC.zip)