Optimizing video for mobile devices

Optimizing video for mobile devices:

Perhaps you just want to know where to start, and how to make such a video from your DVD's. But when you watch video on your PocketPC, you want an optimal image with the fewest megabytes possible. Sometimes optimization is necessary because during playback there is a bad picture quality, schocking picture transitions (the movie stutters) and there is a bad audio-video synchonization. These effects are caused by flooding of the processor by too much video-data. It can also be caused by the wanting to strech or shrink an image during playback.

Depending of the video player of your choice, you have to decide if you video format you want to use. Both Windows Media Video (WMV) and AVI (DivX) are based on MPEG4 and offer comparible video quality. The difference is mainly in the player capabilities.

Conversion applications

What to do depends on where you are coming from. Biggest difference is the source of your original video:

• DVD
• Other digital video (like AVI, DivX, MPEG4 movies)

Ripping DVD's for use on a mobile device

Please be advised that, depending on local law, ripping DVD's can be considered illegal. The United States is among these countries. Other countries have fair use rights that allow copies of your own DVD's for your own personal use only. Please also be reminded that distributing ripped data from a DVD to others is illegal in almost every country in the world.

There are dedicated applications for ripping DVD's directly to PocketPC formats (basically eliminiating the second step). These applications can rip your DVD into the correct format in one click. The following are known to us:

• Fair Use Wizzard (Freeware)
• FlasKMPEG (Freeware)
• XMedia-recode (Freeware) a very versatile transcoding aplication that allows you to select specific devices to encode to. Only disadvantage is that it is in German only.
• DaVideo Pro ($20,-)
• SPB Mobile DVD ($24,95) is a very easy to use conversion application that converts both to WMV and AVI format. It provides a preview of the encoding quality and supports QVGA, VGA and square screens.
• DVD Catalyst ($19,95 for the simple GT version)
• Yayasoft MagicDVDRipper ($29,-)
• <a title="CloneDVD mobile" href="http://www.slysoft.com/en/clonedvd-mobile. ...