Windows Phone Thoughts: Put a Movie in Your Pocket with the Pocket DVD Wizard

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Thursday, June 23, 2005

Put a Movie in Your Pocket with the Pocket DVD Wizard

Posted by Steve Sharp in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM




Figure 3: Determine the file's output size.

Compressing Movies is Slow Good
Pocket DVD Wizard 2005 does suffer the same plight that similar products also encounter: it takes a long time to encode a movie. Obviously, the length, compression level, and the processing power of the desktop computer that is compressing the movie has a great deal do with the time it takes, but it's quite slow. I compressed Pirates of the Caribbean to a size of 250 megabytes using a Pentium 4, 2.66 Megahertz processor and with minimal overhead running in the background, and it took about ten hours to compress. Of course, the logical approach would be to start the encoding process before going to bed or before leaving for work, and having the file completed and ready to transfer to the Pocket PC, when you return.

Otherwise, although possible, it isn't practical to try to continue using the desktop PC while the encoding is going on; the compression process saps a huge chunk of processing power, and I suspect that forcing the processor to divide time between other applications and compressing a movie, could lead to unfavorable consequences to your movie. Admittedly, the results are worth the wait, and there is not, to my knowledge, any other program of this type that is significantly faster, or any easier to use. Other than the occasional long flight, I seldom have a couple of hours to sit down and watch a movie on my Pocket PC, and for this reason, I wish that there was a way of stopping and resuming the movie at a later time, besides simply pausing it and hoping that I don't have to do a soft reset before I can finish watching the show. There is the option of using the Windows Media Player's slider to advance the movie to the area where you left off before, but it would be possible and feasible to have a sort of "bookmark" feature that would allow the viewer to resume where the viewer left off before.


Figure 4: Pocket DVD Wizard 2005 works well, but it takes time.

Conclusion
Coding Workshop Limited has built a new level of flexibility into Pocket DVD Wizard 2005, at a competitive price and user plenty of user options. Depending upon your model of Pocket PC, two hours of sound and animation maybe be taxing to the battery, and lighting conditions may prevent you from being able to easily see the images on the screen. However, the picture quality is more than adequate, the animation is not jerky, even on my relatively slow processor, and the sound is sharp and clear.

As an added bonus, Pocket DVD Wizard 2005 will allow encoding of other video formats such as DivX and .avi. If you're in the market for a DVD compression program, Pocket DVD Wizard 2005 is a strong candidate in the field. Coding Workshop Limited offers a free trial program which will allow the user to compress 5 minutes of sound and video, just to give you a sampling of the image quality that you may expect from the program. The free download is available at Pocket Gear, Handango, or from Coding Workshop Limited.

Steven Sharp is a system analyst by day and a freelance writer by night. He is a 38-year-old native and lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama. His first book, The Art of Managing Everyday Conflict was published in May 2004.

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