Windows Mobile has incredible potential for watching movies among other things. On your next 5 hour business flight, instead of sleeping you could be watching Fight Club. Sound good? I’ll show you how to watch DivX movies on your Windows Mobile device.
The coolest thing about having a Windows Mobile device, and the reason why it is your endless source of mobile entertainment, is having the ability to watch ANY movie (in DivX format). Before you leave on the next business trip, it will be important to find the movies you want to take. And then we’ll need to setup your Windows Mobile OS with the apps needed to run them. In this guide, I’ll show you what programs are needed and how to set them up.
The checklist for this guide includes a decent SD Card (at least 1 GB), an SD Card Reader to transfer files, and your computer with Microsoft ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center installed.
Applications
Here are the programs you’ll need. For now, just download and install them. In the next section I’ll explain how to set them up.
PocketDivXEncoder
This program will convert your DivX or Xvids to a much smaller file size & resolution for ideal playback on your Windows Mobile device.
Download
Install notes: this will be run from your computer.
TCPMP
“The Core Pocket Media Player” is our media player with support for all of the common audio & video codecs including DivX, Xvid, and AC3.
Download
Install notes: Download the CAB, copy it and install it directly on your phone.
Let’s Watch A Movie
Fight Club (or any movie will do, I guess). To get started, you’ll need your movie in a format such as Xvid or DivX. Typically a DVD quality movie in these formats will be about 600 MB to 1.5 GB in file size. At this size, the movie is still to large for your device because A) it will take up a huge chunk of your storage card and B) your device unlikely has the processing power to play a movie of that size.
This is where PocketDivXEncoder comes in. Load up the program and select your movie as the “File to encode”.
In the “Output Options” I recommend you set Video and Audio Quality to about 16 and 4 respectively.
The next important option to set is the “Output dimensions” . You’ll want to set this to your device resolution. On my phone, the HTC TyTN (aka Hermes), the screen resolution is 320×240. A quick Google search for can tell you what your phone’s resolution is.
With that set, press “Encode Now” and within a few minutes it will generate your movie file. Transfer it to your SD Card and load up TCPMP on your mobile device to test it out!
Did it work for you? Let me know, I’m all ears and I’ll help where I can!
Tried this on my HTC S740 (528Mhz) with Windows Mobile 6.1. The PocketDivxEncoder part is OK, but TCPMP don’t work on my phone. Won’t start…
Boo! That sucks! But you know what, you’re absolutely not alone in this. I upgraded to WinMo 6.1 on my HTC Hermes and now I can’t get it to work either! So now I use CorePlayer which is, by far, a nice player anyway. Seriously, much better interface, works right away and isn’t a huge memory hog.
Sadly it’s not free like TCPMP, but it’s cheap at least - and with 20% this month, it’s pretty cheap.
Try out a trial of it first if you’d like - trust me, you’ll love it. Get both the trial and the full app in the WinMoCool store and use the coupon code ‘WMCoolOpen’ for 20% off at the checkout.
Lemme know if you run into any problems with it - trial or otherwise. I’m pretty well versed in it now, myself heh.
Hi i have a htc tytn II and i used the converter to conver a file as said above but it wont play and ideas please, email me at jhnxxx2@aol.com please all help needed many thanks
john
I wish moviesplanet.com will set up a mobile website. they have almost everything, but still can’t watch it using my sony mobile
I use SPB Mobile DVD to convert DVDs to WMV. Of the programs I’ve used, this seems to produce the best final product. Full length movies generally run about 300MB when converted to 320 x 240.
At one point I had The Office, Season One, Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Cannibal the Musical and iRobot on my phone. It made for fun conversations at work.