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Did you know that you can watch a whole DVD on your Smartphone? Aye,
you may have heard of it but maybe you thought that you need one of
those dead expensive large capacity memory cards that would cost an arm
and a leg and have enough space to store Peter Andre's chatup lines.
Using
some easy to use software, you can compact a whole DVD (that is, the
movie and its sound) into a file as little as 110Mb with excellent
quality sound and video! That means that if you have a 128Mb card, you
can watch a movie from it. Of course, that doesn't leave you with much
space for other stuff (which, in my opinion, makes the whole 128Mb card
claim a little silly), but if you have a 256Mb card (which are really
cheap these days, especially if you shop around on the internet (I got
mine from Amazon ), you'll have plenty of room to mess about.
Your
first task is to get the video off of the DVD and onto your PC (make
sure that you own the DVD and don't go copying other people's DVDs
because that's naughty ;-) To do this, I use DVDx,
which is a free program to take a DVD and make it into an MPEG on your
hard drive. This is the process that will take ages (many hours,
depending on your PC spec). I generally have this running overnight
since it takes so long on my 1.3Gz processor.
 Then
you convert it to something your Smartphone will understand. The
cheapest option is to use the free Nokia Multimedia Converter (it comes
with your PC Suite software) which will take your file and convert it
into 3GP format. This format is Ok, but the player isn't the best in
the world and you don't have any bells and whistles with it (seeking
within a file and so on).
If you have a means of converting it
to Real Media format, then that is an option since all Symbian
Smartphones come with support for Real Media.
Failing that, you
can pay some money for software which does the converting and the
playing for you (some will even copy the movie off the DVD for you).
Applications such as SmartMovie (shown in use in the screenshots), DVDPlayer and DVD Catalyst.
As I said, I use SmartMovie and the quality is quite outstanding. It's good enough to hear and understand
a stand-up comedian and also good enough to watch (the screenshots may
look low quality, but that's because of the screen-grab software I've
used).
So, the possibility is there and the process is really,
really easy. The only problem with the whole thing is that it takes so
long to get a movie off the DVD onto your phone. But if you're going
away for a while, or you could do with some light relief in your
lunch-break, then give this a consideration.
Your Symbian
Smartphone is capable of doing a helluva lot more than just making
phonecalls (though you may want to try and ensure that you have some
electricity handy since playing movies on any platform will drain the
battery somewhat - having a charger handy doesn't cost much more than a
tenner these days anyway).
Error, missing joomlaboard config file!
Orginal Story from : http://twyn-y-berllan.com/blog/2005/01/smartphone-watching-full-movies-on.html
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