The
Core Media Player for Palm and Windows
By
Mark Lyndersay
I’ve got a problem. This week, I’ll be travelling
for more than 24 hours in two 12-hour stints. At least ten
of those hours will be in the air and with check-in times
the way they are these days, at least four and possibly
six hours lounging around in airports.
If there’s one thing that travelling has taught me
it’s that if you don’t want to be bored on a long
flight it’s a good plan to walk with your entertainment
and the longer the trip, the more varied the diversions
the better.
The problem, of course, is power. Alternating current. Juice.
Electrical outlets are at a premium in aircraft and generally
aren’t available to passengers to recharge laptops
or other electronic devices.
Here’re how my options break out.
Laptop for movies, preloaded web pages, PDF files and on
the off-chance I’m feeling productive, tackling a backlog
of work.
Palm PDA for movie clips, PDF files, digital short stories.
iPod for music, audio books and recorded broadcasts.
Previous experience with travelling with these devices suggests
a power capacity profile that looks like this; laptop for
reading, two and a half hours, movie on DVD, 90 to 100 minutes,
PDA for reading, 5 hours, for movie clips, two to three
hours, iPod on continuous audio playback, four hours. Mixing
in a movie I might actually want to watch on the flight,
sleep, and a book, I think I’m covered.
Given the additional problems of electrical outlets in Europe
and my preference for travelling light, my recharge plan
calls for a single powerpoint going to the laptop, with
the iPod and PDA trickle charging off it overnight.
My standard strategies for preserving power on a laptop
while inflight include killing the overhead light and dimming
the screen right down with any files I hope to access on
the disk, since a spinning optical drive consumes even more
power.
By investing time in advance, I can turn selected video
clips and movies into files. I like the MP4 format for movies.
It offers great quality at reasonable sizes. A typical movie
running for an hour and a half can be reduced to 400 pixels
wide or 60 percent of a DVD’s normal width and compressed
down to a 300-400MB file that offers quality roughly equivalent
to a television screen. Advantages? A file that’s one-tenth
the size of the full movie on DVD that consumes only the
power that the spinning hard drive uses, leaving the optical
drive quiet.
Now this use of intellectual property is frowned on, so
you should only transfer movies you own. The software for
doing the transfers must strip the copy protection off the
disc to create the movie file, which is definitely illegal.
A casual search of the Internet will turn up several tools
that can do the job but be aware that the resulting file
is in an intellectual property gray area and should only
be used by the owner of the original media.
On the PDA, I’d been using Kinoma’s producer and
player but you have to pay extra for widescreen playback
of standard file formats. Fortunately, there’s a free
player that does exactly that. The Core Media Player plays
MPEG 1 and MP4 files as long as you keep the bitrate (the
amount of data that plays back per second) below 900Kbps.
These MP4 files also play back just fine on a newer video-capable
iPod. I use the Palm TX in widescreen mode (a very nice
380 pixels wide) to view television shows that I capture
on a computer and turn into MP4 files stored on an internal
1GB Secure Digital card.
Adobe’s Acrobat for Palm converts PDF files on the
PC side into reduced files readable on the PDA, but flipping
between pages can be sluggish in graphics heavy files and
the Palm reader doesn’t recognise the TX’s widescreen
mode.
As a final touch, I’m going to give some valuable space
in the shoulderbag over to full ear headphones rather than
the smaller, neater portable headphones I usually use. Seven
hours worth of engine noise with something clamped over
my ears seems to cry out for the comfort of foam-wrapped
in faux leather.
Traveller’s
advisory
The Core Media Player for Palm and Windows CE <tcpmp.corecodec.org>
Audiobooks for iPod and other media players <audible.com>
Short stories and novellas for PDAs and SmartPhones <www.fictionwise.com>
Acrobat Reader for mobile devices <www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrmobiledevices.html>
MP4 converters for Mac <www.isquint.org>,
<handbrake.m0k.org>
MP4 converters for PC >www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/>,
<www.xilisoft.com/ipod-video-converter.html>
