Windows Phone Thoughts: Windows Media Player 9 Series for the Pocket PC - Awesome Performance!

I don't even know if that's technically the correct name for the app that ships with Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PCs, but I wanted to give Microsoft credit where credit is due. I'm heading out of town to visit some friends this weekend, and they haven't seen our dog Keiko yet. Like a good "parent" I took some video footage on my GL2 as our puppy was growing up. But being the time-challenged person I am, I didn't have the time or desire to manually edit the video into a masterpiece - so I just fed it through the amazing Muvee and got a cute little video to show them. I'm testing the iPAQ 1940, and was curious about the performance of the 266 mHZ Samsung ARM processor in it. How much power does it really have?

I also heard about WMP9 being able to handle fairly high bit rates, so I was curious to know if the 256 Kbps preset in Windows Media Encoder 9 was overly conservative. It was! I manually changed the encoding parameters to devote a full 300 Kbps just for video, and 64 Kbps for the audio. I also bumped up the frames per second to 24 from 20, and the results are excellent! The 1940 was able to play back the video without any problems at all, and the extra 100 Kbps or so devoted to the video makes the quality noticeably better. I plan to push it even higher when I get back - this Samsung CPU is impressive for only 266 Mhz! And kudos to Microsoft for radically improving the performance of WMP when it comes to video - they really worked some magic with the code.

Check out the video for yourself (1.78 MB), and if you have a Pocket PC 2003 device, try it out - the quality is great!