09.13
The Palm Treo 650 is a pretty amazing little device. In addition to all its other bells and whistles, it has a 312 MHz Intel processor, a 320×320 TFT active matrix screen with 16-bit color, an SD memory card slot, a stereo headphone jack and great battery life. Sounds like the perfect mobile device for watching video on the go.
Thanks to the developers of The Core Pocket Media Player, watching videos on a Treo is pretty easy. To install the media player, simply click the preceding link and follow the site’s download and installation instructions. To save the internal memory of my Treo, I opted to install the application onto a 1 gigabyte SD card.
Once you’ve installed the media player, you’ll need some media for it. Since commercial DVDs are too large to fit onto your Treo, you’ll need to resize and transcode (or decompress and recompress with different audio and video codecs) your DVD into something that TCPMP can use.
There are a few steps in the process:
1) copying or ripping the video to your hard drive,
2) resizing the video to a smaller resolution appropriate for the Treo’s 320×320 screen,
2.1) optionally, cropping the video to make it better fit the Treo’s aspect ratio (At 320×320, the Treo has a 1:1 aspect ratio. Most commercial movies have aspect ratios ranging from 1.85:1 to 2.35:1)
3) transcoding the audio track from the DVD’s ac3 format to mp3 format,
4) transcoding the video stream from the DVD’s MPEG-2 codec to MPEG-4 (note, there are numerous flavors of MPEG-4, including DivX and XviD).
Rather than tackle all of these steps with separate programs, I suggest using an all-in-one application. If you are using a Mac (and you really should be), then I highly recommend HandBrake. If you are using a PC, then I suggest using Gordian Knot, hosted by the folks at doom9.org. If you are using a GNU/Linux distro, then you can probably tackle this one by yourself (try googling ffmpeg if you need some pointers). You can find detailed installation and use instructions on the respective web sites.
How will it look? Click one of the X2 pictures below to view a short clip at 320×128 (the original movie was resized to a width of 320, but was not cropped).
H.264 .mov format
DixV .avi format