Mobile Blog: Video, Media, Augmented Reality, Rich Media, IVVR

First of all, Windows Mobile is so close to Windows for desktop PCs that you might expect to install some of the applications you know from your desktop on your mobile. Media Player, Outlook and Office Mobile, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on -it’s all included in WM6.5 Pro. What’s left? A good mobile media player! WM6.5 Media Player doesn’t like my DivX movies and some MP4 files. For DivX there is a solution: DivX Mobile Player for Windows Mobile. Note: Although DivX Mobile supports the latest DivX codec features, your mobile processor is limiting your mobile video experience. I’ve downloaded a DivX movie from the Internet and tried it on my phone: The sound was fine, but the video was choppy. After some experiments I saw, that a video bit rate above about 300 kbit/s is causing problems. For the technical folks: It is not really the bit rate, but the complexity of the encoding that makes the mobile processor go nuts. The higher the bit rate and the higher the complexity, the more likely the video, or even the sound will be choppy.

DivX Mobile Player is for free, but it doesn’t support native MP4 containers with h.264. Therefore I bought CorePlayer Mobile for $30. It’s nice, but not really worth 30 USD. It doesn’t offer as many codecs as VLC or mplayer, and it’s user interface is too desktop-alike. CorePlayer Mobile has a lot of submenus; you need about 4 clicks to activate the fullscreen mode! Unfortunately, VLC for Windows Mobile isn’t available yet: VLC forum.