Spb Mobile DVD - Convert DVDs & Videos For Playback On Smartphones & PDAs

Earlier this year I bought a Cingular (now AT&T) 8525 Windows Mobile smartphone. A pretty amazing mobile device, it offers a variety of state of the art features, including the ability to record and play video at a pretty good quality level.

That's a great feature, and as a father of small children I like to use that ability to entertain the kids when we go out to dinner so we adults can have a reasonably quiet meal!

Having said that the question is how to get videos on the phone? Since it isn't an iPhone I can't just go to iTunes and buy them, so where/how to get the video on it?

That's where the Spb Mobile DVD application comes in.

Available at Handango.com for $24.95, this is a simple downloadable application. With it you can easily - and fairly quickly - convert video from a file on your hard drive or from a DVD to a format that is playable on a variety of mobile devices.

Features

• Windows Mobile Smartphones supported
• Microsoft Windows Vista supported
• XVID compression quality improved
• Fastest possible conversion speed
• Adjustable quality with real-time preview
• No additional software needed on Pocket PC
• DVD and video file sources
• Conversion to both WMV and XVID formats
• Possibility to convert entire movie or only some part
• Dual core CPU support
• Support for slow 200MHz Pocket PC devices
• qVGA, VGA and square screen support

Conversion Options

• Audio language
• Subtitle mode and language
• Convert entire movie or only a part
• Output video format (WMV or XVID)
• Output resolution
• FPS
• Zooming and cropping modes
• Quality or file size

Does it work?

Well this was actually a pleasant surprise. The answer is it not only works, but works quite well and better in some ways then I expected. Conversion was fairly fast, from 2X real-time to up to 5X real-time on some videos. I was able to convert video from a variety of sources, including video I had shot on my DV camcorder and copied to my hard drive (these had already been converted to MPEG for DVD burning), some MPEG videos recorded to hard disk from TV, and DVD-based videos. This included full length movies too, but be warned you will need a fairly high capacity storage card for these as files reached the 300+ MB level for 90 minute movies.

You can record the converted video back to disk where you can copy them to your phone from the PC, or you can record directly to your memory card (although I did not test this option). Once loaded onto the phone the Mobile Windows media player played the videos quite well, with audio and video staying in sync throughout all the videos I tested it on.

All in all I can highly recommend this product. You can find it at www.Handango.com or by clicking here .

Posted at 03:52PM Jul 02, 2007 by Lou Wallace in Consumer Electronics  |