Video Platforms For Handhelds

There is a Windows version of the encoder, but not a Pocket PC version of the Player. Hoddie says that Kinoma has had requests from many "content publishers to offer our technology for the Pocket PC. In fact, many of them tell us our video motion and quality are better than most of the video they've seen on Pocket PC. We've focused on the Palm-powered market because it is by far the largest PDA market. If there are viable opportunities in the future on platforms such as Symbian, Pocket PC, Brew, or Java, we'll make our Player available there." As for whether they plan to support for ISO-compliant MPEG-4 (along the lines of Simple Profile/Levels 0 and 1), Kinoma is undecided. Their goal, Hoddie says, "is to provide customers with a high-quality video solution, not to support any particular industry standard. MPEG-4 has some excellent properties, but there are also some significant licensing issues around MPEG-4 that make it a challenge to deploy," Hoddie says.

As for storage requirements and performance, a 30-second clip encoded for a Palm m130 weighs in around 1.2MB. Same for the m515. On the Sony NR70, it requires 1.8MB. This is most likely due to the fact that the system has a faster CPU (the Motorola Dragonball SuperVZ processor, running at 66mHz.) and can thus handle files with a higher data rate. The m515 uses the same CPU, but only running at 33mHz. You will again notice during audio playback on the Palm m-series PDAs the same metronome-like sound experienced when watching gMovie files. Again, it's due to the audio hardware and its weak audio decoding capabilities. On the higher-end Sony Clié models, that is not a problem.

Kinoma Producer is one of the better video and audio encoding tools currently available for the Palm platform. The frame rate, overall picture quality, and manageable file size rivals several of the other formats.

However, as we'll discuss shortly, Cleaner 6 from Discreet provides you with a couple of extra perks that improve upon Kinoma. I'd rate Kinoma the second-best tool to use. The faster frame rate and optimization for the current crop of handhelds yields a movie that plays much smoother than gMovie. Video and audio are synched throughout. Unfortunately, the tool does not have any deinterlace controls, so if your source video is encoded at D1, you'll see 3:2 artifacts in your movie. Oddly enough, reducing your source QuickTime movie to 1/4 screen (320x240) before encoding eliminates the problem.

TealPoint Software's TealMovie
TealMovie, from TealPoint Software, enables any model Palm OS handheld to play reasonable quality video and animation. It supports smooth playback up to 25fps full-screen color or grayscale imagery. In addition, it supports WAV file and synchronized sound playback, meaning you can encode a .wav file to play back and listen to on your Palm. TealMovie also fullysupports external VFS-compatible expansion devices, including Memory Stick, Compact Flash, and MemPlug SmartMedia as well as SD and MMC flash cards. That's a good thing, considering that several video clips can quickly consume your PDA's built-in memory. The Windows-only converter program creates TealMovie-format files from standard AVI, QuickTime, and WAV files. It also supports automatic scaling, cropping, sound compression, and filtering.

Vince Lee, president of TealPoint Software, explains that the encoder is Windows-only. The Mac encoder is in beta, is command line-based and buggy, and there are no plans for a Mac GUI. Teal does have in development an internal encoder and player combination with high-resolution and 16-bit color support; once they complete development, they will release a Windows GUI and a Macintosh command-line version concurrently. These new releases will offer enhanced resolution and color controls, Lee says. In addition, the new application will offer "an option to insert key frames into the encoded video stream, allowing rewind/fast-forward/seek operations not currently allowed by the existing codec." TealMovie 3.0 supports Palm OS 5 natively. It supports true 16-bit color and takes advantage of the new ARM processors. It can now play back letterbox-formatted movies as well as support frame rates of up to 60fps.

It's interesting to note that there is no specific TealMovie video codec per se. "If you are referring to the codecs which can be imported, the TealMovie encoder simply calls Windows' API decoding services, which support any compression for which a 16-bit codec has been installed," Lee explains. "It's not that the 32-bit codecs used by DirectShow are not called, as this interface was designed primarily for direct playback to the screen." He continues by explaining that "the encoder also supports QuickTime files and any format supported by QuickTime except MPEG files because QuickTime's MPEG implementation was not written to be thread-safe, and this is necessary to run in the Windows encoder framework. The Mac command-line encoder, however, does not use threads like the Windows GUI encoder, so it can actually import MPEG files through QuickTime, while the Windows GUI encoder cannot."

I asked Vince if there had to be some kind of codec specific to TealMovie that the player on the Palm was decoding to support playback. Kinoma has its Cinepak Mobile codec, therefore wasn't there a TealMovie codec? "The codec is both a compression format and device-specific code which encodes or decodes that format. Kinoma probably uses Cinepak's plug-in structure as a shell to run their encoder module, but they've almost certainly developed their own compression format for the Palm, which is tailored for the resolution and CPU speed, just like we have. We're probably both running custom compression formats that don't have an exact equivalent on another platform. This is especially true since all Palm databases have to fit a rigid record-based file format which means that a Palm cannot even hold a QuickTime, AVI, or any other standard linear file in memory, and don't have the CPU power to decompress common video compression methods very well."

The encoder tool does offer a decent set of controls to prepare your .pdb clip. You specify the video and audio source, whether the end result is for color playback on the Handspring Prism, Palm IIIc, m505, or any of the older grayscale Palms. If you are optimizing for the Palm IIIc, your color space is 12-bit. According to the TealMovie manual, while the IIIc can only display 256 different colors (8-bit) at a time, the selected colors are chosen from a larger range of 4,096 colors (12-bit) that the display hardware is capable of generating. This limit can lead to noticeable color quantizing, or "banding," in movies. If you are optimizing for the Prism and m505, your color space is 16-bit. Again, according to the manual, the Visor Prism and m505 are capable of displaying colors from a 15-bit color space, leading to slightly smoother color gradients and less banding. With Version 3, you can now optimize for TrueColor, which provides the best-looking color imagery with the least color banding and the most faithful color reproduction. Your TealMovie files will average 50% larger when compared to similar color movies at lower color bit depths. In addition, the handheld must support 16-bit color.

Your optimal frame rate is either 8fps on a slower device and 12fps on a high-end system, such as the new Clié NX or Palm Tungsten. Movies can be compressed for multiple resolutions, including 160x160, 320x240, 320x320, and 216x384, depending upon the device you are optimizing for. All Palm models can play back video at a resolution of 160x160 pixels, however, you may experience sluggish playback on those handhelds that support a higher-resolution 320x320 pixels.

With the built-in cropping tool, you can choose the original full frame or scale the file to letterbox forma