…that really is a movie in my pocket.
I thought it somewhat appropriate that the first movie I watched on my Treo was about virtual reality. I’d never seen it before, picked up the DVD a couple months back in some bargain bin, so when I went to test out some software, it was first on the list for testing.
Lawn Mower Man was entertaining, and the process for converting and watching the movie on the palm pretty straightforward and easy.
After reading a random page elsewhere on that thar interweb, I used Fair Use Wizard with the Free Lite edition to rip the DVD to a DIVX file. Time consuming, but otherwise pretty simple, and the end result was exactly what I wanted. A 263MB avi with the movie on it.
Instead of using mmplayer as the article suggested, however, I’ve been using tcpmp for my treo video playing needs. Amazing program, all the better because it’s Free (yup, with a capital F, source available). Next time, I’ll use a totally Free set of software to do the whole process.
Anyway, pretty darn fun to watch a movie on the treo, and battery life was amazing. I imagine since the plugins to do divx and mp3 decoding are done in arm assembly (I think?), they tend to use a lot less power than it might otherwise seem like they would. Either way, I watched the whole movie (well, most, I skipped a few parts playing around with the navigation in tcpmp) and still had about 60% of my battery life (oh yeah, and I had been using the treo at work earlier in the day too). Pretty darn sweet.
Hey Jordan, I love watching Shadowlands on my Treo. THanks so much for helping me. I ask only one more thing, could you please put “Dream Team” on digital so I could put it on my card. That way, I would have one serious movie and one comedy, depending on my mood. Thanks so much for all you do.
Left by Greg Wiens on September 28th, 2005