I got an old Pocket PC given to me so I thought I'd try to use it as a video player. The Pocket PC I have is an Toshiba e310 (200Mhz processor). The Windows Media player is very choppy so I gave up on that but....

I downloaded PocketTV (http://www.pockettv.com/) and re-encoded some samples using the UBR template. The video looks very good and plays smoothly even with high action full screen! The only things I changed were the resolution (to 320x240) and the sound quality (I dropped it a bit since I couldn't hear the difference on the PPC anyway).

So the UBR templates find a new home in portable media players and KVCD amazes me once again! Of course having 6 hours on a 1 Gig SD card is not bad either!

BTW, the Toshiba e310 sells for as low as $35 on ebay! Not bad for a meda player that has a bigger screen than the iPod.

I did not try to use MPEG2 for the moment with the pocket PC I bought last week. For the moment I'm using TCPMP to read... divx that I encode with PocketDivXEncoder.

Full screen movie needs 100-130 MB/hour, I have doubt that I can have better even with KVCD

I didn't try Mpeg2 on my old Pocket PC but like I said, the Windows media player was choppy likely due to the very slow CPU. (I am not saying that it isn't possible because I haven't done any testing.)

I think with a newer Pocket PC (and faster CPU), you would be able to play any format and like you said, get better compression.

To clarify, I don't think my Toshiba e310 will compete with an iPod because it screen quality is quite low (by comparison) but it is interesting that you can make use of older technology with the help of KVCD/KDVD.

Perhaps another dedicated thread could be started for the Pocket PC.

Hi MrTibs,

I believe there are threads about PocketPC (KVCD) encodings here on the forum
As a matter of fact, I added support for low resolutions on CalcuMatic a long time ago, so check it out!
I recall encoding the complete "Matrix" movie on 128MB, and it looked just great
That was MPEG-1 though.

-kwag

Thanks Kwag. I did a search earier this week and didn't find anything. I guess I'm getting old. Once again, you are the king!

I followed the links you provided but I have a couple of questions if you don't mind.

I like the Ogg Theora codec but I wonder if it will be much better than your Mpeg1 template at 320x240? (Yours is truly amazing.)

Why did you use a resolution so low? Is that the resolution of the phone or is there some other reason. My PPC has a resolution of 320x240.

Ogg Theora is far better than any MPEG-2 or even MPEG-1 Those resolutions were made for SmartPhone devices

-kwag