Windows Phone Thoughts: Put a Movie in Your Pocket with the Pocket DVD Wizard

Figure 1: Pocket DVD Wizard 2005 allows the user to determine the file format that will be output.

Bringing the Big Screen to a Small Package
When I signed up for this review, I was a little skeptical about how my trusty but slow O2 XDA2's processor would hold up to the demands of playing full-motion video for an extended period of time. There was no problem.

Those who have ever messed with DVD-encoded video files know that the video and sound data on a DVD disc occupy several gigabytes of space. The very idea of squeezing all that data down to 250 megabytes, and retaining any semblance of picture quality seemed unlikely, at best, to me. I could envision trying to decipher garbled audio that was unsynchronized from the on-screen events, and grainy, muddled images of tiny unrecognizable people playing out scenes on my small screen. Do I sound like a skeptic? Yes, I was. But, not anymore. For the compression level and screen resolution of my Pocket PC, the picture was much clearer than I had expected. The sound quality was very good, and my concerns about the feasibility of trying to watch a motion picture on a screen the size of my Pocket PC's were quickly put to rest.

• Supports "landscape" or "portrait" viewing;
  
• Supports either "letterbox" or full-screen viewing;
  
• Supports compression of video other than DVD-encoded files.

Figure 2: The wizard allows the user to choose the compressed files settings.

What Does it Take to Do This?
Pocket DVD Wizard is a bit different than most Pocket PC-related applications, and I'll tell you how. The application doesn't reside on your Pocket PC, and no part of the program resides on your Pocket PC. This program makes demands of your desktop and virtually no demands of your Pocket PC. Obviously, if you're going to compress a DVD, then your desktop PC must have a DVD drive, right? Also, the completed, compressed file must reside on your desktop until it is transferred to you Pocket PC, and the output file can be as large as 512 megabytes. It goes without saying that the more processing power that can be devoted to the compression process, the faster the task will be completed. I have a 512 Megabyte SD card for my Pocket PC, but I have about 100 Megabytes of stuff on there, so I decided to that I'd opt for the 256 Megabyte output, at "normal" resolution (not VGA) and started it up. As the estimated time for completion grew, I realized that this wasn't going to be something that I should wait around for, I left it running. When it was finished, the next morning, it took a couple of minutes to transfer it over to the SD card. Once it was transferred, it's as simple as opening Windows Media Player and opening the file.