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Mobile Multimedia

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CIOL Bureau
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Movies in your pocket



A standard movie fits in about two CDs, sizing up to be approximately 1 GB. To watch this movie on a mobile device, such as a smart phone or PDA running Windows Mobile OS, you have to do two things. First you have to convert the movie into a WMA file and then reduce its resolution to reduce the file size. Reducing the resolution won't cause any problem- though a standard DVD or CD is created such that it can be viewed on large monitors, even 320x160 resolution will look decent on a PDA's smaller display. Doing this is not difficult as there are lots of software available over the Net for the task. Some of them are Pocket DVD, Pocket DVD Wizard and Pocket DVD Studio. Most software cost between Rs 1,000 and Rs 2,000. We liked the Pocket DVD Wizard because it allows you to not only strip a DVD, but also regular .mpeg or .dat files so that you can convert any movie file, even if it is your birthday party's video created using a handicam. The software is one of the lowest priced among its competitors. This month's PCQ Essential CD carries the shareware version of the software. You can also buy it online from

http://www.pocket-dvd-wizard.  com/buy. html for $24.95 (approx Rs 1,200).

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Direct Hit!
Applies

to:
Mobile persons with smart phones or pocket PCs
USP:

Fit large DVD/VCD movies into a PDA and convert ebooks to MP3 format to listen to them 
Links:

http://pocket-dvd-wizard.com/buy.html,  Â

http://visual-mp3.com/ 

Using this software is very easy. Install it on your PC, just as you would any other Windows application, and start. If you are stripping a DVD then select the first option and follow the wizard. The wizard will ask you many things before it plays the movie-such as do you want to strip the movie for a 128 or a 256 MB SD card, do you want the sound or the video to be better, and is the movie full screen or widescreen. Select the appropriate options and continue. It takes quite a long time (can be a couple of hours depending upon your DVD drive's and machine's speeds). It took us about 5 hours to strip the DVD of the legendary movie Golmaal on a Celeron 1.7 GHz machine with 256 MB RAM. On the other hand, CDs are quite fast. We stripped a CD in just 20 minutes. But in the case of CDs, there is a bug in the software. By default the software is capable of opening and stripping just .mpeg or .avi files, so it doesn't open the .dat files that are present in a VCD. Thus, to strip a CD you have to first copy the .dat file into your hard drive and then rename it to .avi. After that you can follow the standard procedure to compress it. 

Connect your pocket PC to your car stereo using a media convertor

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Once the compression is done, copy the file into an SD card and play it on your pocket PC or smart phone. The same software is also available for PalmOS-based PDAs and versions for Symbain based mobile phones (SE P800/P900) will be released soon.

Tell me a story



Digital assistants are fast replacing good old grannies, who used to tell us fairy tales. While you're driving or just relaxing with your eyes shut, your PDAs can read out your mail, important documents and even stories. There are three ways by which you can do

this. First is a text-to-speech engine, which can be installed on your PDA. Toshiba PDAs come with such software. But these software have limitations-for example, you can't play files larger than 60 KB. 

The second option is to download MP3 ebooks, which are MP3 files generated by either making a person or computer actually read out the book. But the number of these kinds of books is not very large, so it is quite likely that you won't find an MP3 of your favorite Don Quixote novel. Thus, you are left only with the third option. Obtain software that can be installed into your PC and convert you ebooks and documents into MP3 format, which you can then copy to your PDA and play. This software is called 'Visual text to speech MP3'. The shareware version of the same is available on this month's CD. You can buy it from

http://www.visual-mp3.com/. The product costs a mere $25, and lets you convert any text document into .mp3 and .wav formats. You can also adjust the bit-rate, frequency and channels (mono and stereo). We converted a file with about a hundred thousand words into a 64-bit mono MP3 file of size 17 MB that was more than half an hour sound track. 

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PDAs and car stereos

If you are one of those who drive long distances daily, then there is a lot your PDA can do for you. If you have a standard cassette player in your car then you can buy a media converter (a dummy cassette with an input connector), which costs around Rs 300. You can then use this device to connect your PDA to your car's music system and hear MP3 music, MP3 ebooks and any audio file supported by your PDA, with your car's speaker sets.

This software is also easy to use. Just run it and open the file you want to convert and press the 'textàMP3' button. It will open the wizard from where you can select the above mentioned settings. Here it is preferable to select the 'mono channel' option as it reduces the size quite significantly and also doesn't affect the quality. 

Source: PCQuest

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