Video Platforms For Handhelds

Generic Media's gMovie Maker
gMovie Player is a consumer application for the playback of color video, animation, and still image files on any Palm handheld, including the Palm, Sony Clié, and Handspring Visor. gMovie Maker optimizes video playback to 8fps at a screen resolution no greater than 160x120 pixels. With the Sony Clié, you can push the frame rate to 10fps. And given the old Motorola processors that drive these first- and second-generation handhelds, aspect ratios of 120x92 and 80x60 are far more appropriate.

The most appropriate audio codec to use here is adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM). ADPCM codecs are waveform codecs that instead of quantizing the "speech" signal directly, like PCM codecs, quantize the difference between the speech signal and a prediction that has been made of the speech signal. Use a sample rate of 4.096kHz on first-generation Palms or Handsprings; 8.192kHz for second-generation models; and 16.384kHz for the current generation (which includes the Palm m-series, Handspring Treo, and the Sony Clié NR-series). ATRAC3 audio is available only on the Sony Clié (the N600C, N700C, N710C, N750C, S300, and S500C). A 30-second clip encoded for a Palm m505 will weigh in at around 1.8MB; for an m130, 2.4MB; for the Sony N700, 1.8MB.

An oddity that you will notice during playback of the video on your Palm m-series handheld is a ticking, metronome- like sound. It's not the fault of the player or the encoder. Rather, it is due to the poor audio fidelity of the built-in speaker. It has been designed for system beeps and other "low-bandwidth sounds." This audio problem is not resident on the Sony Clié because the PDA has a dedicated DSP for audio decoding. Sony also engineered the Clié's speakers to support higher-quality fidelity. On my m130, my 30-second clip (a trailer for The Matrix) was struggling to keep up. Picture and sound were not synched until the next keyframe. The overall picture quality was pretty good, but starting from a D1 source without any preprocessing or deinterlace, 3:2 artifacts were frightfully apparent. You have to reduce your source movie file to 320x240 or smaller to eliminate the problem.

Kinoma Player and Kinoma Producer
Kinoma Producer is an up-to-date encoding tool from the engineers who wrote gMovie Maker. It can encode from a wide range of source file formats including QuickTime, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, AVI, MP3, Macromedia Flash, JPEG, animated GIF, and PNG. It's been designed to encode video for the latest high-end Palm devices (the m130, 515) and Sony Clié PDAs (the NR, S, and T-series). The Samsung SPH I300 and Kyocera QCP 6035 cell phone/PDA combination devices can support the Kinoma video format as well. Version 1.5 of Kinoma producer features compatibility with the new Palm OS 5 for ARM processors, the ability to display interactive VR objects and panoramas, and support for the new Palm Tungsten T handheld. Through the use of what Kinoma refers to as an "ARMlet"-optimized ARM-native code, Kinoma player delivers smooth video playback at up to 30fps, even when your clip is played back from removable storage. In addition, Kinoma Player 1.5 brings support for interactive VR objects and panoramas.