Today I finally worked out why they call it the M25. For twenty-five miles per hour is the average speed, actually this is more like an aspiration, you'll achieve as you wend yourself slowly and painfully round it's north-western section. And so it was this morning at about 7.45am on the aforementioned road to hell that I took some geekish consolation in being able to watch Matrix Reloaded on my Pocket PC which was perched precariously in front of my speedo, an instrument I decided I could do without for the time being. I wired the headphone jack audio output through my car stereo's casette player using a simple patch rig (the same one I used last year to pump internet radio through my car stereo) and the overall experience was pretty bloody good, actually.
That this is even possible is thanks to a trick new piece of software that goes by the name of DVD To PocketPC which I picked up from Handango last night.
It works like this, bang a DVD of your choosing into your PC's DVD drive, fire up DVD To Pocket PC, point it at your DVD, flick some settings about, hit GO and wait 2 hours for your average movie to be extracted and then encoded into a Pocket PC optimized Windows Media movie file. A couple of hours of movie and stereo audio takes about 128Mb which should fit easily on a reasonably sized SD card and which can then be played back on the handheld. As far as I know video playback is optimal on the latest 400MHz X-Scale processor equipped Windows Mobile 2003 PocketPCs, I suspect the older or slower models would stutter too much on playback. On my suitably specced iPAQ the playback is smooth and the sound is good. I reckon that watching one movie would just about kill your battery but this is understandable.
Right now I'm encoding a handful of Frasier season one episodes and I'm more than comfortable with the future propsect of being able to kill down-time or departure lounge time safe in the knowledge that, together with a pair of headphones, I'll be able to watch a couple of classic episodes on demand.
For the last few months I've been trying to get my head around the true market potential for pocket video playback devices. I don't think that pocket video clips will ever be as readily pickup-able or ubiquitous as MP3's, but given today's increasingly low-cost and high-capacity pocket playback devices, they're definitely in the same ball-park for sure, especially suited to episodic media like Frasier, The Simpsons and other short form material.