This is a Necropost. Resurrected from a long forgotten PDA review website.
Summary
TealPoint's TealMovie 3.50 claims to do the impossible - and it delivers.
Palm Pilots are great for displaying text, there's no doubt about that, but I've never seen one handle full motion graphics with any kind of clarity before... until now. TealMovie 3.50 allows you to convert AVI and Quicktime movies into a format that can be played on your Palm.
There are limitations, of course. A lot depends on the speed of your PDA. For the purposes of this test I was using a Handspring Treo 180 running OS3.5h - different machines will perform with varying quality.
The first thing to note is that, depending on your PDA, the movies you will produce will only be 160*160 10fps greyscale (on a Zire or m100) and up to 320*320 25fps true colour if you have a very modern PDA. I successfully got up to 20fps, which is more than suitable for watching short movies.
Your PDA's speaker also limits the quality of the audio reproduction. Although the software can drive the speaker to incredible volumes, the fidelity is very poor. Listening to speech is fine, but once music comes into the equation the sound is little more than a garbled mess.
The software comprises of two parts - makemvoi.exe, which performs the conversion on your PC, and tealmovi.prc that allows the movies to be played on your device.
If you have the latest multi-gigahertz machine the video encoding process will fly by. On a more modest machine it can take up to a second to convert one frame. I was using a 750MHz Duron that took about 2.5 times real time to convert a movie.
About the software
The interface for makemovi isn't wonderful. It suffers the same usability flaws as products like TMPEncode - too many option presented in an unclear and inconsistent manner. It allows you to set the resolution, speed and orientation of the movie and allows you to make minor adjustments to the audio.
The files it produces are impressive in size, a 6MB Quicktime Movie (Kylie's Agent Provocateur, if you must know!) compresses to around 3.5MB. This may vary depending on whether you choose colour, high resolution etc. Movies can be stored in your PDA's internal memory of on a media card.
The main problem with makemovi is that it is very particular as to which movies it will encode. There is no way to encode an mpeg, nor DivX. Many movies would convert video, but not sound. If they could bundle a few more codecs into the software it would improve its usefulness immensely.
The playback software (tealmovi.prc) is very good. It presents you with a list of the movies you have loaded and during playback allows you to adjust the Gamma Contrast (making the movie brighter or darker), the volume and the position in the movie. Playback is incredibly smooth as long as you encode in a format that is suitable for your machine. The encoding software does give you some idea of what your machine can handle, but it's best to experiment.
So, the software does exactly what it says it will - it allows smooth video playback from your PDA. The real question is whether that's a good thing...
Conclusion
I'll admit, it was fun to have Kylie in my pocket and at my beck and call... but my Palm screen just isn't designed to watch full motion video. If you have an external media card you could place a full-length movie on it, but for the time it would take to encode is prohibitively long. The quality, while impressive, isn't sufficient to keep your eyes from melting after a few minutes and the sound quality isn't good enough to stop it annoying the people around you.
The software is ideal for showing off and if you have a fast and full colour PDA you could watch The Simpsons on the way to work. This is an amazing piece of software engineering. It squeezed every last drop of power from my Palm and gave impressive results. For $19.99 it's a fun way to show off your gadgets, but for general entertainment, I think I'll stick to reading eBooks for now. If someone wants to send me a Sony Clie to see what results it produces on a high-end machine - I'd be more than happy to change my opinion!
