Watch movies on your Palm

When I first got my Palm Zire 31, I tried many kinds of software to make it able to watch movies. The Zire 31 wasn’t really made for it, but yet I was able to crack some softwares and watch a couple of movies on it. But the software I used (Smartmovie) needed me to convert normal video/vcd files to handheld formats, and it just took too long. I think I eventually gave up.

Now that I’m using the Zire 72 passed on from John, which has better processing power and abilities to watch movies, I decided to try it again. Palm’s own website wasn’t particularly helpful in providing a suitable third party software. They list these:

Kinoma Player (third-party)
MMPlayer (third-party)
Pocket-DVD Studio for Palm (third-party)
TealPoint TealMovie (third-party)

All the above are sharewares and have their limitations with the demo copy. I found mmplayer useful but it doesn’t come with all the neccesary codecs to watch all formats of video. Pocket DVD Studio for Palm is a conversion software that can convert nearly everything to a size of your choice. However, the demo version can convert up to 10 min of the video only. Tealpoint needs to convert everything and is just a plain headache.

Only then did I find out about the best opensource video player for Palm and Pocket, called the TCPMP (weirdly named tho), short for The Cord Pocket Media Player. In Palm it plays just about any format, aside from WMV and RMVB. If you’re looking for AA3 audio encoder which it doesn’t package with, search around....it can be found. The plugin is neccesary for getting audio in mov files. Apparently, it’s against the MPAA for putting the codec with the package.

Having movies on the Palm is super convenient especially when waiting for somebody, for the bus, when there’s a blackout, etc etc. There are some great movie makers out there that make short movies for handhelds. Some great sites are:

www.pocketmovies.net
www.animwatch.com
www.zvue.com

I found these independent films really good…do check them out.