Movies on a Phone
by bill
A movie on your phone? Why not? I thought I'd give it a try...
Everyone seems to be talking about getting video into your pocket at the moment, from network operators to the latest Silicon Valley startup; the dream of being able to watch videos in the palm of your hand (or, more importantly, collect revenues from users watching movies on the move) is alive and well.
Of course, no one knows what kind of video content users will pay for (though Big Brother in the U.K. did well selling video clips to owners of Nokia 3650s), and streaming is still a black art which has shown little efficaciousness, downloading and playback are still the order of the day, ideally by MMS.
But if it were possible to get an entire film onto a mobile phone or PDA, would it make a practical viewing experience? Would it even be possible to get a film onto a phone, even the latest Symbian handset or PDA? I decided the latter problem was most interesting to address, and that the process might lead to exploration of the former.
Getting a film to try this experiment with isn't difficult.
There is a great deal of video material on the Internet available free, some of which is most entertaining. My personal favorite is www.archive.org, where you can download U.S. Government information and other films from the last 100 years.
But I want a proper, full-length movie.
So the plan is to start with a DVD of a film and, using only free software, to attempt to get that film viewable on a Nokia 3650 handset, a Microsoft Pocket PC device, and a PalmPilot. I selected The Fifth Element as being appropriate for such a procedure and started with the DVD.
Getting The Content
DVDs are protected against this kind of thing, not to stop people watching on their phones, but to prevent illegal copying.
Luckily for us the protection isn't very good and the easily obtainable DVD Decrypter from Lightening UK! started the process by collecting the information from the DVD and placing it on the hard disk.
This process isn't for the faint-hearted. You'll need around 5 GB of free disk space and it takes about 30 minutes to lift a whole DVD.
When you first run DVD Decrypter you'll notice that your DVD contains a number of video files. These may make up the "Extra Content" or animations. The length of these files is displayed and you should be able to work out which one to decrypt based on that. What you end up with is a single AVI file of about 5.85 GB, depending on the length of your choice of movie.
Remember that AVI isn't a format, just an extension, and AVI files may exist in a number of different formats.
That's a good start, but the file is still massive and not in a very useful format.
Next we need to translate it into something we can work with (not yet something we can play back on the handsets - we're still some way from there).
FlasKMPEG is a software package from Alberto Vigata for just such purposes; it can convert the files we've pulled off the DVD into something we can use. It's not the most intuitive package to use, requiring you to first open the file you want to convert, then remembering to select an output format before converting it (using Options -> Output Format Options).
Being as I don't particularly care about this format, being as it's just an intermediary, and quality is something I gave up when I decided a phone would be a good place to watch a movie, I selected Microsoft Video 1 for video and PCM for audio.
Converting video is not a fast process and, impressive as FlasKMPEG is, it still takes several hours to perform the conversion. But when it's done you are left with an AVI of your movie you can play back in your choice of PC video viewing software. This won't reduce the size much. The Fifth Element came out at 3.55 GB after encoding into Microsoft Video 1.
If you've got the patience, FlasKMPEG can also alter the video in a number of ways, changing the resolution, cropping and stretching widescreen movies to a more suitable shape for the device.
But doing so slows down the already painfully slow conversion process. (To be fair, in the FlasKMPEG FAQ the first question is "Why is it so slow?" to which the answer is "...the program is free," which is a very fair response for a remarkably powerful application.)
But that's still not what we're after and we have one more conversion stage to work through. (And we've still to establish if the whole thing is actually possible.) Now the process diverges depending on the device you want to ultimately play back on.
Pocket PC
Microsoft Media Encoder is available free from the Microsoft website, and enables content to be encoded in a variety of formats including those suitable for Pocket PC.
Encoding is pretty fast, you can choose to have the video in widescreen or normal, and reducing the audio quality can reduce the size of the final file.
Once encoded you should end up with something around 200 MB. This can be reduced slightly, but not a lot, and quite a bit of processing is needed for playback.
Watching on the Pocket PC is very good, the Media Player application will run in landscape mode, making best use of the screen, so widescreen presentations look really good. While I was encoding different things I did loose lip-sync a few times and this required re-encoding to fix, but was probably due to doing too many things on the machine during the encoding. If left alone the problems went away.
Video was played back on an O2 Xda II and iPAQ Pocket PC from MMC card.
I was able to watch the whole film and do some work before the batteries died on us. But two viewings wouldn't be possible without a high-capacity battery.
PalmPilot
The new PalmPilots have pushed their aimed capabilities, an area where they are often seen as inferior to their Pocket PC rivals.
There is only one option for encoding files for the Palm and that's Kinoma Producer for Palm. If you've got one of the latest models, then this software comes free. If not then your only approach is to buy a copy.
I did look around for free encoding systems for the Palm, but was disappointed. Such solutions that exist didn't really scale to our project (encoding an entire film) so while there is some interesting work being done, right now it's commercial software or nothing. Being as I had access to a new Palm Tungsten 3, I wasn't forced to break my free-software-only rule.
Encoding our film using Kinoma Producer was easy, if not fast, and using the machine for anything else while encoding seemed to cause some lip-sync problems. But the process was very simple.
Options are quite limited (apparently there is a "Professional" version of Kinoma Producer, but that would cost money) so I converted everything as full/widescreen. The quality was very good, but the lack of processing power on the Palm did show in the file sizes. By using less compression it's easier to get the video onto the screen. But the encoded film comes in at almost 400 MB, not easy to get onto a Palm, though a modern MMC card was used to fit it on and allowed smooth playback.
Watching on the Palm was pretty good.
The video looked very good but the smaller screen does mean smaller video and the player won't use the expanded screen of the Palm Tungsten 3. You could certainly watch a whole film and perhaps almost two, but then the battery would let you down. Extending the battery life on a Palm isn't easy, so on a long flight you have to ration your video viewing.
Symbian Mobile Phones
There are several software packages available for playing back video on a Symbian handset, but RealOne Player is included in the Nokia 3650, so it made sense to try using that.
I downloaded the Helix DNA Producer and tried just encoding and copying the file, but that didn't work. Much mucking about revealed that if you want to encode content for Real using Helix you need a specific Job File, so I downloaded one of those, but when I tried to install it Helix dropped out saying I had to buy the commercial version. $200 might be very reasonable for a development company, but for this particular madness it seemed excessive. So I looked elsewhere.
The RealOne Player used in the Nokia 3650 can also play back 3GP files.
These are video files encoded to a standard set by the 3GPP Consortium (who develop standards for GSM networks). he files are actually encoded in MPEG-4 or H.263 and have the extension .3gp.
This standard is used for MMS messages containing video, and video recorded on the Nokia 3650 is also in this format. I tried encoding some content using MPEG-4 and just copying it over, but that didn't get us anywhere, so some sort of trans-coding would be necessary.
On the edge of giving up, I suddenly came across the Nokia Multimedia Converter, an ideal tool created for the job. This application is free from Nokia and can encode AVI files into 3GP for playback on a Nokia handset. It's written in Java so it's not fast, but it still manages a respectable speed (taking about two hours to encode the whole movie). It actually encodes into the H.263 format, which is more efficient than MPEG-4, so the file sizes should be small.
So we now have our movie - the size shows that the whole thing is well under 50 MB - making the whole thing easily fit onto the 128 MB maximum officially supported by the MMC memory cards usable in the Nokia 3650 (though we've managed to get a 512 MB card working without any problems).
The next problem was how to select the file for playback.
If you have Handy File (an excellent file manager for Series 60 phones) then it's no problem. Just select the file.
But Handy File costs money (albeit well spent money) and one of our requirements was that the whole process shouldn't cost anything. So I looked to RealOne to be able to open the file.
I had copied the file (Fifth.3pg) onto the root of the MMC card, so I knew the path would be E:\Fifth.3gp though Real refused to recognize the file when browsing.
I next tried to enter the address as a URL, but hit a problem in that you can't type a backslash when entering a URL. Remembering the copy-and-paste function, I composed a text message using a "\" and pressed the pencil button while pressing the navigation pad to highlight it, which meant I could copy the character and then, by pressing the pencil again, paste it into the URL I was entering.
Once entered, the file took a while to load. But once there it worked and I could finally watch the whole movie on a mobile phone!
The quality wasn't great, and the playback hiccups every now and then. But by lowering the frame rate to 10 (in the Nokia Multimedia Converter) the hiccups vanished and the playback was remarkable watchable.
I tested playback on the Nokia 3650 and a Nokia 6600 and, while less than perfect, it was still entirely possible to enjoy a film, even if the Real Player doesn't allow you to move around the video at all (no fast-forward or rewind and no progress indication), with the right Bluetooth headset the audio could even be sent wirelessly (in mono).
Unsurprisingly the phones did do very well regarding battery life, being able to last through several viewings without noticeable trouble.
Conclusion
So, should you throw away your TV and make your mobile the center of your life? Probably not.
While we demonstrated that it was possible to watch a movie on your mobile phone or PDA, the question of whether it is a good idea remains. The phones I tried didn't support headphones, though some headsets worked fine even if that meant further lowering the quality of playback.
Having spent several hours encoding video for a particularly long flight, I was distressed to remember that I wouldn't be allowed to use my phone on a plane! The battery life on the Pocket PC is very restrictive but the Palm works well, certainly well enough to compete with the in-flight entertainment.
With the capacity of MMC and SD cards increasing at such a rate, it seems obvious that the ability to store films and television programs will become mainstream well before devices dedicated to it are available.
I found, having established that films were possible, that episodes of television series worked better for entertainment. Films are just so unsuited to the small screens on the move.
Lifting content from DVDs is easy enough, though it remains to be seen if the dedicated video devices can afford to provide software to make this as easy as copying CD content to modern MP3 players.
Copying and converting video is a lengthy process, even with commercial software, and it seems unlikely that it's going to make the mainstream until processing powers improve enough to make it a slick and quick transfer. But all of the devices I tested were more than capable of playing back a whole movie, as long as storage was available.
Movies on the go? Not yet, but we're getting there.
Links
DVD Decrypter: www.dvddecrypter.com
FlasKMPEG: www.flaskmpeg.net
Microsoft Media Encoder: www.microsoft.com, search for "Media Encoder"
Nokia Multimedia Encoder: forum.nokia.com