clie | strudel.org.uk

Video Recording

I will write this sometime.

Video Playback

At home I have a Linux PC set up with a Hauppage WinTV card (~£35) so I can record TV programs and watch them when I want. Although this is just what a video recorder does, the advantage is that it allows me to watch (previously recorded) TV over my home network. Now I can watch recorded shows wherever I am e.g. I spend an hour on the train every day so why not watch TV while I'm there. The good thing about the NX70V is that it allows me to do this without anyone else really noticing (well the train I get on isn't too crowded).

So can the NX70V play TV? Well my Linux box uses Mencoder (the recording part of Mplayer) to record the programmes and they usually work out about 90MB for around half an hour. However, the format it uses requires DivX and as far as I can tell, this isn't available for PALM OS. Ideally I would just be able to put this file straight onto the memory stick, but I haven't yet worked out if I can record it directly in a format that the built in Movie Player can play. The NX70V does comes with an Image Convertor (on the CD - no Linux version) which can convert images and movies into a format that the built in Clie Viewer/Movie Player likes. However my problem is that Image Convertor isn't able to convert the files that Mencoder creates so I run the file through VirtualDub keeping the video stream the same (direct stream copy) but changing the audio stream to full processing. This takes a couple of minutes to run through a 30 minute program with a 500MHz processor. Once this is done, the file size goes up to around 160MB and can then be put into Image Convertor.

At this point you are probably thinking that this file is going to be way too big to fit on a 128MB memory card (NOTE: The NX70V doesn't come with a memory stick - you have to buy one seperately) but the program changes the format to MPEG4 and can reduce the file size down to 25-30MB. MPEG4 is the latest version of MPEG and is designed specifically with the Internet in mind and thus small file sizes. Unfortunately the Image Convertor takes a long time to convert files (real time - it took about half an hour) and I haven't been able to find a program to convert to MPEG4 that goes any quicker. There are three settings on the Image Convertor which give roughly 4MB/s, 2MB/s or 1MB/s so you could possibly get 2 hours of video on a 128MB memory stick.

TIP: Although Image Convertor complains if you haven't attached the NX70V to your computer (it tells you that there is no memory stick) it will record directly onto your hard drive if you just make it continue. It then saves the file into the directory MQ_ROOT/100MQV01/ which is where it would have saved it on the memory stick. You can then copy the file across yourself using MSImport. The advantage is that you can keep a backup of your movies on your hard drive and you don't need to have the PDA attached to your computer the whole time.