Movies Coming to a Handheld Near You
Pocket PC Films has made a multi-year licensing agreement with Generic Media to use their gMovie Player to play feature films and other types of programming on any Palm OS handheld. Pocket PC Films holds a library of more than 25,000 titles, including ones from Lions Gate Entertainment. Their catalog has titles of all genres, including business training videos, animated and children's programming, sporting programs, and religious programming.
gMovie Player will be preloaded into every Pocket PC Films program sold on CD-ROM. In order to be able to view these movies, a handheld with the ability to store large files will be required. The latest version of gMovie Player can play directly from external memory cards.
Typical shows available from Pocket PC films cost between $5 and $15. The gMovie Player is free.
Thanks to Ed Baran for the tip. -Ed
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RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
Very true. I was doing some comparitive research between FireViewer, gMovie, and TealMovie. I also wanted to see a movie clip on a PocketPC to see where it would stand in the mix, but NONE of the PPC users I know had anything loaded, and did not want to load anything.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
I bet you can only watch 1/2 hour before the battery goes dead. If the battery does last longer, just imagine how tired your arm will be holding the pda in front of your face for 2hrs, and what about all the butter stains on your Pocket PC from eating popcorn?.
Under no circumstances do I ever want to watch a movie on a handheld....ha ha ha what a joke..these are the days of large screen multispeaker home theater systems, gimme a break...ha ha ha
RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
Tho' not very good for watching big movie, but for short pieces it's pretty amusing. Full screen landscape seems to work the best.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
Depends on the device. On my former device, an M505, a 30 minute movie would drop the battery level by 16%.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
Further, how great would it be to be able to beam others video business cards? Instead of just a little card with your name and phone number on it, or just an entry in a phone book. You could be distributing a 15-30 sec. commericial along with your contact info. This would be a sure way to remind the person who you were and why they were interested in you or your product.
think outside the palm people! Video is for more than watching your favorite "Ren and Stimpy" episode.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
A cool idea. It would not be difficult to create a custom app just for this purpose of beaming two specific files in one shot. However, one of the good things about address beaming is that it is quick because there is only a few hundred bytes being transferred via IR. A 30 second video clip will be between 400k and 1.5Mb depending on frame rate and audio compression, so instead of an almost instant beam, you would be standing there for a couple of minutes.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
Went to try the same thing on an M515 and wound up with a 10% battery level drop for 30 minutes. The clip was a 2 minute 11 second looped movie segment in TealMovie, 5058071 bytes, 10 frames per second, uncompressed audio at moderate volume, 12 bit color. There is a 16 bit color option in TealMovie, but it does not work well in my opinion... it looks worse than the 12 bit color.
Based on this crude test, you should be able to make it through a 2 hour movie (not something I would do unless desperate) and still have slightly more than half of the battery life depending on your device. For (very) rough estimates on devices with different battery life, take your usual total runtime and chop off two thirds.
The M515 was at 86% at the start of the test, and 76% at the finish. I did not want to start it with it at 100% because most M series palms drop from 4.17v to 4.07 and still show 100%. There's some latency, kind of like a car's gas gauge after a top-off.
One thing that became clear to me was the benefit of having earphones. Watching this thing on the plane without them will probably bring on irritated glares from other passengers. Something to keep in mind for my next PDA purchase...
RE: Poor Choice of Name
RE: Poor Choice of Name
They don't make it yet.
Storage is a moot point, both will use whatever card capacity is available.
The champion of battery life in the PPC camp hits the low battery window at 4 hours, 22 minutes when playing MP3 with the screen on medium brightness. Thats with no other functions going on, no multi-tasking, no concurrent pim functions, and the RAM empty except for the media player.
RE: Poor Choice of Name
A few comments ...
2. IMO I don't believe a lot of people would pay for the movie, download it, and than watch it on that small screen of his/her handheld. I sure don't want to do that. Maybe it will take off if they movies where for free and had ads in the movie instead (like TV). Maybe when 3G networks are common, some of us will like it.
3. There's a lot more Palm powered users than PPC users out there. But given the current stats of the Palm hardware, watching a whole movie on Palm won't catch on out side of geek community. With next gen ARM based Palms however, this might change.
RE: A few comments ...
I certainly do not want to watch a movie on my palm, not even if its free!
RE: A few comments ...
RE: A few comments ...
My current difficulty with this is that TealMovie has no rewind or fast forward feature, and when you exit the program you lose your place. A solution is to break up a movie into segments, but that takes more time than I care to take for conversion. Besides, if it takes 4 hours to breakup and convert a 2 hour movie, what's the point of watching it on your Palm to save time?
Just for kicks, I converted the entire movie Shrek and loaded it on my SD card. The converter ran all night so I don't know how long it took. I broke it into two segments, which totaled around 90Mb. It played fine directly from SD, but I noticed that smaller files play at a better frame rate than larger ones from SD. The amount of free RAM also affects playback speed.
Even though I got the whole thing working well (the Palm hardware did fine), I never watched more than a few minutes. The most useful purposes I have found for movies on a handheld has been for storing movie trailers (can convince the wife to see a different movie), and for short kids videos.
My wife probably has the most valid use of video. She has her dance rehearsals taped, and has me load them on her Palm for practice sessions. If there is any question about some obscure move, they can watch the session right there. She can also take these, along with videos of the kids, into hospitals and prisons. In some of those situations, they are very restrictive about what you can bring in with you, but they do not seem to care about a "simple" Palm Pilot. Even if it is loaded with audio and video clips, reference libraries, Bibles, books, or photos.
RE: A few comments ...
They where not even able to make the report window in Sync rememebering the last scaling...
The escape in the media world on the palm is a jump out of the window 80th floor - nobody wants to see a 2:30 movies on a palm formfactor - not even a xxx rated - Not even a freak - bet my palm shares on that.
This will be the final nail in Palms coffin - any bet against?
RE: A few comments ...
RE: A few comments ...
Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
A Palm OS port of the DivX codec is all we need.
And to people who go off about not watching movies on your 2 inch screen: it's not as if you will be sitting in your living room and choose your palm over your 63" plasma screen. That's just ridiculous. But holding that in my left hand standing on a subway with my ear buds in and watching a movie i've seen a thousand times and can stand catching the littel bit i can on my commute? Sure.
Waiting in the doctor's office and instead of playing bejeweled for the thousandth time i can watch some movies or shows.
Portable DVD players are only slightly larger than the 320x480 screen of the new Sony. I can't wait for capable processors and (hopefully) video codecs as well.
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
Next Gen Palm devices will be expensive
Palm will annonce that they will not support 3.5 and 4.0, 4.1 anymore.
And all the software you bought is seing the big software Manitu soon.
Get your wallet ready folks - Palm needs your cash!
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
The utility is certainly greater than looking at a spread sheet on a PDA.
Next Gen Palm devices will be boring...
This will bring more satisfaction for sure!
That can easily be done now - the shelfes of ebooks are full AND FREE.
Are people so lonely and empty nowadays that they have to turn to electronic companions?
If so:
Then be honest - rush to Vegas and marry your Palm.
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
Now if they make it play in full screen landscape mode, that would REALLY rock.
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
-aardvarko
webmaster at aardvarko dot com
http://aardvarko.com
RE: Next Gen Palm devices should be interesting...
As soon as Palm has the hardware then the DIVX community will produce the software.
Is the timing right?
This is not a bash on PocketPC Films. In fact, without companies like them the bars will not be pushed higher with what we can do with PDAs.
I am looking forward to the day Apple puts a decent colored screen on its iPod and I can rip my DVD and download via FireWire. Or the new iPaq with that Toshiba 5Gb internal drive with USB2.0. Now, when that happens PocketPC Film will score big time. Not now.
RE: Is the timing right?
you can already rip DVD put it into a big 500+mb SD card, and have fun. That's enough for 20 movies. In case you need to do trans-pacific flight bring those 9Volt battery extender.
you think gadget with hardrive like iPOD would ever have the battery life beating non mechanical devices? That not to mention Steve job says he never will make PDA.
RE: Is the timing right?
It is a "hypothetical" question if and when Apple releases an iPod video device, by the way. Read it properly unless of course, in Planet Alice they don't teach you that.
RE: Is the timing right?
Panasonic 256 & 512 mb SD card released last year. Some store already offers the 512 tho' not widely available yet.
www.dpreview.com/news/0109/01092801sdmmc256mb512mb.asp
and in this planet call 'reality' people are actually already watching mpeg/divx video from SD card. (with screen almost as big as current iPod's dimension. well whaddya know......! )
PPC envy...
PPC envy ;)
Well, how much does the average mp3 player cost? And what about the average gameboy?
If I can play doom, quake or most gameboy/game gear games on my PPC, listen to mp3's, and also use it as a PDA, I think all of those multimedia features are well worth it.
I mean, sure, playing froggy is nice. When I'm done playing froggy, what will I do? Hmmmmm not much.
And trust me,the battery life on many new ppc's is better than the cliés, so there.. and I can recharge with a cable, not needing a CRADLE that's very big.
All that for 200$ more? A PDA, MP3 player, and gameboy would cost me at least 400$ more... heh
RE: PPC envy...
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Poor Choice of Name
My guess is, despite what PPC users claim, very few of them actually want to watch a movie on their handheld. This forced Pocket PC Films to expand their market to the dominant handheld platform to find more customers. They are probably still doomed. I can't imagine anyone enjoying watching a movie on a 2 inch screen.
Before they go under, could all of you who work with an obnoxious PPC user download a movie and play it in front of them? This should shut them up about the multimedia capabilities they paid an extra $100 or $200 for.