October 12th, 2007 — Articles
Leon Schell has put together a great article on setting up a Windows Media streamer on your regular PC for use on the Pocket PC. He focuses on streaming TV but you can do just about anything available from your PC.
Pocket PC Thoughts would like to give a big Thanks! to Leon for putting this together and selecting us to publish it. Here you go!
Watching TV on your Pocket PC
I have always wanted to be able to watch the 8 o’clock news on my iPAQ while sitting in the garden, so I was intrigued by the post of That_Kid in Andy’s What to do with wirelessly connected Pocket PCs @ home. That_Kid basically described he was streaming everything everywhere using, among other things, Windows Media Encoder and Windows Media Server. I remembered having seen Windows Media Encoder on Windowsmedia.com so I thought it was time to learn in what way WME and WMS could benefit me.
I decided to have a read at various documents on MSDN which is always a good start when checking out Microsoft technology (See the MSDN library, then from the menu Graphics and Multimedia | Audio and Video | Technical Articles).
In the end I decided to start with Windows Media Encoder (about 4 MB), so I downloaded, installed and started it. As I would soon find out, it was the only program I would need. Wow! I can’t remember having been up and running so quickly ever before (using rather advanced technology) - in no time I was watching TV streaming from my desktop PC to my wireless iPAQ. Interested? OK, here’s how:
The things that you need:
•A wired or wireless network. Here I will take a wireless Pocket PC as a client.
•Something you want to stream, e.g. your TV card (sound and video). You could also stream sound only, e.g. from your favorite MP3 player. In this example I will use my TV card.
•Windows Media Encoder
First, start your TV application on your desktop PC. Then open Windows Media Encoder. As soon as you start WME, a Session Wizard pops up:
Click Next.
(For me, selecting the TV card driver itself didn’t work - the TV image would freeze and there would be no sound. So I selected Screen Capture)
Choose Configure. You will see a drop down list with all currently running programs. Select your TV application and click OK.
Click Next.
Remember the URL that is given here. You will need it later to connect to the stream. Don’t change the port unless you have a good reason to. Click Next
Select a streaming profile. There are several available and you probably will have to experiment a little, depending on your network bandwidth, preferred screen size, number of frames per second and percentage of CPU usage you are willing to sacrifice. Although MSDN says WM8 is not optimized and not recommended for streaming using Pocket PCs, I actually got terrific results with the selection shown in the picture below. I can watch a soccer game on my iPAQ and, not unimportantly, even see where the ball is.
Note: you can also click “Edit” to fine-tune your selection.
Click Next. Actually, you can click Finish here but the first time you may want to fill in the Display Information.
Click Finish if you haven’t done so before.
That’s it. Now, open Windows Media Player on your wireless Pocket PC or another PC on your network. Select Tools | Open URL on the Pocket PC or File | Open URL on a PC and enter the URL you remembered from earlier on.
Tap OK and enjoy!
Remember: you can stream any window. That includes your webcam (video) or your favorite web radio (audio). Tip: there are web radios out there that have a special HTML interface with ActiveX or Java enabled Play buttons that won’t work on a Pocket PC. Using this setup you can start that radio on your desktop PC and then stream it once more to your Pocket PC.
If you connect a digital video camera, for example through a firewire cable, XP will recognize it immediately and you will be able to stream the video image directly choosing Capture audio or video from attached devices or computer screen in the Session Wizard.
You can even open port 8080 on your firewall and watch TV from e.g. your PC at work using the IP address you got from your ISP instead of that internal (192.168.x.y) IP address. The possibilities are endless. You can’t change channels remotely but you could use Terminal Services or Windows XP’s Remote functions for that. But that goes beyond the scope of this story…
Conclusion: Windows Media Encoder is all you need to add an extra dimension to your Pocket PC. It’s a free download and no Windows Media Server required! You will need to experiment a little with the various options to get the best results but when that’s done you can save your settings for future use. Likewise, you can save your streaming URL as a Favorite (Tools | Add Web Favorite) in Windows Media Player, so you don’t have to type in that URL all the time.
Note: sometimes, after changing the streaming profiles, you’ll hear sound on your Pocket PC but there will be no image, or nothing will happen at all. Don’t think immediately that you tried a useless setting. Let WMP try to reconnect, rather than just tapping the Play button and it will probably work.
By Ed Hansberry on Tuesday, September 3, 2002
October 12th, 2007 — Articles
If you’ve got a Windows PC, this article will show you how to get audio & video content from your PC onto your Pocket PC. There are two ways of doing it:
- By encoding the source material into a format suitable for the Pocket PC and then copying the files onto the device
or
- By using a network (preferably a wireless one!) and streaming the encoded data over to the Pocket PC
What You’ll Need
This article is going to focus on using the following:
- A Windows PC
- A Pocket PC with Pocket PC 2002 or 2003
- Windows Media Encoder
- Windows Media Player on the Pocket PC
- A wireless network (optional)
There are other ways of achieving the same end results with other pieces of hardware and software. If you don’t want to use some of the above, hopefully this article will help you to use the items of your choice.
Getting Started
Before your Pocket PC can play audio & video, the material needs to be in the right format. If you are using Windows Media Player, this means Windows Media Audio and Video files.
If you’ve already used Windows Media Player to rip a CD onto your home PC, the files on your PC are Windows Media Audio files, so you can just copy the files onto your Pocket PC and start playing them.
Video is a bit harder 
. Luckily Microsoft has a free tool to make life easier for us - Windows Media Encoder. There are two versions of the encoding tool available for download - Encoder 7.1 and Encoder 9. Please note that the latter is, according to Microsoft’s site, only for use with Windows 2000 and XP.
Which one should you use? By preference, you should use Encoder 9 as it is the more up-to-date encoding application but, as noted above, it does require Windows 2000 or XP. Otherwise, use Encoder 7.1 - it does the job just as well even though it isn’t using the latest algorithms from Microsoft and the user interface is a bit awkward compared to Encoder 9.
Most of the PC screenshots in this article will be from Encoder 9. If there are significant differences in appearance from Encoder 7.1, I’ll point them out.
So what does the encoder software do? It takes your source material and converts it into a format that the Pocket PC can handle. In the case of video, this involves making the picture smaller (e.g. 208×160) and fewer frames per second (e.g. 8 instead of 29.97 for NTSC and 25 for PAL).
Enough detail - let’s get our hands dirty!
The Encoding Process
By this point, you should have downloaded & installed one of the encoding applications. Fire it up - you’ll find it on the Start menu under Windows Media.
Encoder 7.1 starts by giving you the choice of using the New Session Wizard, create a custom encoding session, open an existing encoding session or a recent encoding session.
Figure 1: The opening choices with Encoder 7.1
Choosing the New Session Wizard and clicking on OK presents you with the available wizards - broadcast a live event, capture audio or video and convert an audio or video file.
Figure 2: Encoder 7.1’s encoding wizards
Encoder 9 takes you straight into the choice of Wizards, making it easier for you to set up the encoding session.
Figure 3: Encoder 9’s New Session window
For now, choose the “Convert a file” wizard. Both encoders then display a window asking you for the source file and the output file. Do take account of the tip that is displayed in the window - always use the highest quality source file. Re-encoding a file that has already been processed in a way that has resulted in some loss of the source data will not be as good as encoding the original source file.
Once you’ve picked your source & output file names, click on the Next button. The encoder then asks you how you want to distribute your file. If you are using Encoder 9, choose “Pocket PC” and click on Next. You will then be asked how you want to encode your audio and video. Leave the video option set to “Pocket PC standard video” but change the audio to “Voice quality audio”. Click on Next.
If you are using Encoder 7.1, choose “File will stream from a Web server or play directly on a computer” and click on Next. You will then be asked which profile you want to use. If you’ve got an old Pocket PC or you want to play safe for now, choose “Video for color PDA devices (150 Kbps)” and click on Next. If you’ve got a newer Pocket PC, you might want to try the other PDA profile (225 Kbps) as this offers 20 frames per second instead of eight, but playback may be choppy if your Pocket PC isn’t fast enough.
If you’ve followed the above steps carefully then, regardless of which encoder you are using, you should be looking at a window that allows you to specify information about the content. This allows you to enter the title, author, copyright, rating and description information. Enter as much or as little information as you like and click on Next.
The wizard will then display a review of the options you have picked. Click on Finish! The encoder window will then be displayed, showing audio bars on the left, with input and output video windows next to them and details of the encoding process underneath.
Figure 4: Encoder 9 encoding away
Encoder 9 does the video encoding in two passes. During the first pass, there isn’t any output displayed.
In either case, once the encoding has finished, copy the “wmv” file onto your Pocket PC, start up Windows Media Player, click on Select, click on your file and then on the play icon. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour!
The above steps can also be used to take audio files and convert them for the Pocket PC. By following the above steps and picking an audio file instead of a video file, the encoder will automatically produce a WMA file. The only thing you may want to play around with is the bit rate used to encode the audio. The lower the bit rate, the lower the quality, but it all comes down to taste If you are using Encoder 7.1, the profiles will automatically be restricted to audio-only and you can pick one for a bit rate that suits you.
If you are using Encoder 9, it gets a little bit more complicated because the choice of profiles is based on your answer to the content distribution question. What I would suggest is that you use these steps:
What About The Almost Limitless Supply?
OK, so you may be thinking to yourself “well, yes, but I’ve still got to copy files onto my Pocket PC and I haven’t got a limitless amount of storage, so what can be done about that?” … or maybe not
What we’ve looked at so far is how to encode, or convert material that is on your PC into a format that the Pocket PC can handle. We are now going to take what we’ve learned and take it to the next step - sending it across a wireless network … or streaming it, to use the posh term.
The significant point, though, about streaming from Windows Media Encoder on your PC to the Pocket PC is that you can then use the “capture from device” to your advantage. For example, if you set up Windows Media Player on your PC to play a list of tracks that lasts a couple of hours, you can stream from the sound card device to your Pocket PC without having to spend ages downloading the files to the Pocket PC first.
If you’ve got a TV tuner card in your PC, you can even stream television to your Pocket PC … bliss!
So What Is Streaming?
Streaming, at its most literal, is the continuous supply of data. If you’ve ever watched a movie trailer on the Internet, it is likely that it has been streamed to your PC or Pocket PC. Streaming avoids the need to download the whole file before you can start playing it. That becomes particularly important if you want to watch or listen to a live broadcast … it becomes a bit difficult trying to download that
What Are We Waiting For, Then?
Nothing much! Start by running the encoder application. If you are using Encoder 7.1, leave the first option selected and click on OK then pick “Broadcast a live event from attached devices or computer screen” and click Next. If you are using Encoder 9, select the “Broadcast a live event” wizard and click on OK.
Both encoders will then display a window that allows you to specify the devices you want to use as your source material. If you want to just stream a single file, it can be done, but you need to set up a custom session in order to achieve that. I’ll cover that near the end of the article.
Figure 7: Specifying the devices to be used for the source material
You have to stream at least audio - the video part is optional. So the first step is to turn off the video option if you only want to stream audio. Let’s do that for now - we can come back and do video later.
Make sure that your sound card is selected as the device and click on the Configure button. The window that appears will allow you to select the recording input on your sound device. If you want to stream what Windows Media Player is playing, your sound device must offer something like “What U Hear” or “mixer” - in other words, the output of the sound card. Select that from the “Pin Line” drop down menu, select the checkbox next to Enable and click on OK.
Figure 8: Specifying the input on your audio card
(If your sound card doesn’t give you the option of using its output as a recording input, there is a workaround given in the section “And I Can Do This With Video Too?” below).
Click on Next in the Wizard window to move on to the next step - the broadcast method. If you are using Encoder 9, make sure you select “Pull from the encoder” and click on Next. Both encoder applications will then display the Broadcast Connection window.
Figure 9: Encoder 9 broadcast method choice
Figure 10: The Broadcast Connection window
Unless you want to change the HTTP port being used, leave it alone and click on Next. For Encoder 7.1 users, you are now looking at the Profile Selection, so pick the audio profile you want to use.
For Encoder 9 users, you are looking at the Encoding Options window. By default, Encoder 9 tries to provide multiple bit rates over the stream, with 135 Kbps as the initially selected rate. Leave the settings like that for now - you can experiment later
Clicking Next takes you to the Archive File window, where you can archive a copy of the broadcast to a file. You probably don’t want to do this …
Clicking Next again takes you to the Display Information window. As before, put as much or as little information in here and click Next. If you are using Encoder 9, deselect the “Begin converting” checkbox. With both encoders, click Finish on the Settings Review window. If you are using Encoder 9, you need to go back into the session properties, click on the Compression tab, click on the Edit button, click on the 135Kbps tab and change the audio format from “128kbps, 48kHz” to “128kbps, 44kHz”. Click on OK to close the Custom Encoding window and then click on Apply to keep the change you’ve made.
With both encoding applications, you can now start the encoding process. Since we are just broadcasting audio, there won’t be any video windows shown in the encoder window, but the encoder should be showing activity in the audio bars and the time in the Progress area should be increasing.
Figure 11: Encoding and streaming in action
Ready to start receiving the broadcast on your Pocket PC? OK - here are the steps:
- Start Windows Media Player
- Click on Tools
- Click on “Open URL”
- Enter the URL in the format HTTP://ip addr:8080 where ip addr is the IP address of your PC. Using the IP address avoids any potential problems with the Pocket PC trying to translate your PC’s name into its IP address.
- Click on OK
WMP will say “Buffering” in the status area and then, after a while, change to “Playing”. If you’ve got the speakers on on your PC, you will notice that there is a lag between what your PC is playing and what your Pocket PC is playing. This is normal and is down to the time taken to encode, send the data across the wireless network and then decode it before it can be played.
And I Can Do This With Video Too?
Yes! If you’ve got a capture card or TV Tuner card in your PC, you can choose this as an input device right at the beginning of the steps discussed above. Your PC will then encode and stream the video across the wireless network. As above, there will be a lag, but the streamed video and audio will be in sync with each other, so you won’t notice it if you aren’t able to see the original source at the same time
Alternatively, if you’ve got a video file that you want to stream, you can do this as well, but the steps taken vary depending on which encoder you are using.
If you are using Encoder 7.1, choose “Create a custom encoding session” when you start the application. The New Session window will appear.
Figure 12: Creating a custom session in Encoder 7.1
With the Sources tab selected, click on New. The “New Source Group” window will appear. By default, the video source will be set to “Screen capture”. Click on the drop-down menu and choose “Browse for file”. You can then specify your source video file. For the audio source, you can select a device or a file containing the audio (which may be the same file as that being used for the video). When you are happy with your choices, click on OK. You can add as many sources as you like, thus making the broadcast as long as the combined length of the files.
This is also an alternative way of broadcasting audio if your sound card does not have the ability to treat the output sound as a recording source.
Once you are happy with your source material, click on “Display Information”. As before, enter the information you want then click on the “Profile” tab. Here, pick the same profile you used when you were encoding files. Finally, click on the “Output” tab and ensure that “Broadcast encoded output” is selected and “Archive to file” is deselected. Click on OK and the encoder window will be displayed. Click on the Start button and the encoder will start encoding & streaming the output.
If you are using Encoder 9, the process is very similar. You start by defining your sources, be they files, devices or a mixture. You can also specify what the encoder does at the end of the list - stop, loop, roll over to next source or roll over to first source. Once you’ve specified your source material, you click on the “Output” tab to select “Pull from encoder”. You can then click on the “Compression” tab and ensure that the destination is Pocket PC and that the audio is “Voice quality audio”. Click on “Apply” then “Start Encoding” … and away you go
Gotchas
You may be wondering why, if you are using Encoder 9, I kept on telling you to change the audio settings. The reason is because, by default, the encoder likes to use a 48kHz audio format - which Pocket PC 2002 doesn’t like. I don’t have Windows Mobile 2003 device, so I can’t confirm whether or not that behaves the same way. Anyway, the problem is documented in Knowledge Base article 813693 if you want the MS line on this and how to permanently fix it.
Conclusions
Hopefully I’ve been able to help two audiences with this article - those who want to encode audio & video material for their Pocket PC and those who want to stream that material over a wireless network. By using the encoder application, the process is actually reasonably painless - once you’ve got the hang of the various settings
By Philip Colmer on Monday, August 25, 2003
October 12th, 2007 — Articles
Michael Sprague has put together a couple of nice articles for Pocket PC Thoughts. The first is a short but informative How-to on setting up your PC and Pocket PC to allow you to ActiveSync over the internet. This is perfect for those with broadband connections that are always connected. Click “more” for the entire article. Thanks Michael! This requires the most excellent Pocket Hosts app discussed last week, which should be in future Pocket PC ROMs, or at least in the ActiveSync Extras folder.This How-to is based on the following configuration:
• Desktop computer with ActiveSync is on the Internet, a known IP address.
• Pocket PC device will connect to the Internet over a dial-up connection to your ISP.
Motivation: On my Pocket PC I have a Compact Flash 802.11b network card. I can sync and surf the net at work and at home with the WLAN. When I am traveling however I do not have that luxury. So I have set up my Pocket PC to connect to my ISP through my Nextel phone whenever the WLAN is not available.
Note: If your desktop is behind a firewall you will have to open ports 990, 999, 5678, and 5679 (per Microsoft KB Article).
If you have not set up your Pocket PC for a dial-up connection yet, you will want to do that first.
Step 1.
You must enable network connections to ActiveSync on your desktop computer.
In the “File” menu select “Connection Settings…”
Step 2.
Check the box “Allow network…”
Click “OK”
Step 3.
You must enable ActiveSync on your Pocket PC to synchronize remotely.
In the “Tools” menu select “Options…”
Step 4.
Check the box “Include PC when…”
Make note of the computer name listed, you will use it as the Host Name in the next step.
Click “OK”
Step 5.
You will need to set some registry entries in order for your Pocket PC to locate your desktop computer over the Internet. This is similar in functionality to a hosts file on your Windows PC.
Marc Zimmermann has developed a utility program called Pocket Hosts so that you don’t have to edit the registry directly.
Download phosts.zip from http://zimac.de/software.htm
Add the Host Name that you noted in the previous step with its IP address.
Congratulations, you are done! You should be able to connect your Pocket PC to the Internet over your dial-up connection and synchronize to you desktop over the Internet!
If you have not set up you Pocket PC for a dial-up connection yet, now is the time to do it!
By Michael Sprague on Friday, September 20, 2002
October 12th, 2007 — Articles
Now that ActiveSync 3.5+ and Pocket PC 2002 allow you to synchronize multiple folders, I have been wanting to synchronize my Sent Items folder. Well, ActiveSync doesn’t allow that for some reason. (Drafts aren’t allowed either, but there is a good reason for that - synchronized drafts will lose formatting and come back to the desktop as plain text.) There is a way around the Sent Items folder though. If you are interested, click the Read this article link below.
Ok, so you are interested in synchronizing sent items using ActiveSync 3.5 or 3.6 with your Pocket PC 2002. To accomplish this, you will need to set up a rule in Outlook 2000 or Outlook XP on your desktop.
First, open Outlook and select Tools|Rules Wizard then select New. You should see a dialog box like Figure 1.
Figure 1
Select the “Start from a blank rule” option and then highlight the line that says “Check messages after sending.” Press Next.
Figure 2
Don’t check anything on the Conditions list. Press Next. You will get a message that says “This rule will be applied to every message.” Here, you could get fancy and exclude certain emails you send based on who they were sent to or what they contained. I won’t get in to that here, but you can always come back later and edit the rule and add your criteria here. Press Yes.
Figure 3
In Figure 3, you tell Outlook what to do with your sent message. You want to “move a copy to a specific folder.” Check that box, then at the bottom of the dialog box, click on the “specified” link.
Figure 4
Here you will select the folder you want the message copied to. You can also create a new folder. I called mine “Sent-Dupe” for duplicates.
Figure 5
Finally, name your rule. Outlook may warn you that this is a client only rule. If you are in an Exchange environment, that means that if you are offline, the rule won’t work until you connect with Outlook.
Once you are done, remember to go into ActiveSync’s options and check this new folder for synchronization.
There are a few problems with this approach you should be aware of:
• If you are in an Exchange environment, emails sent from other terminals or through Outlook Web Access won’t be processed by this rule. That is the real significance of the “Client Only” warning. Outlook itself is the program that executes the rule, not the Exchange Server.
• For some reason, emails sent from your Pocket PC, through ActiveSync and finally through Outlook aren’t trapped by this rule. I can find no workaround for this and know of no reason why the Rules Wizard ignores emails sent via ActiveSync.
• Emails will stack up in your duplicate folder on the desktop. I set up an autoarchive process to automatically delete any emails in here older than 5 days. If you ever really need the deleted emails, they are retained in your real Sent Items folder.
• Emails copied to this folder are marked as unread. Again, I can find no workaround for this. No Outlook rules have the ability to mark a message read.
This isn’t perfect, but it does allow you to at least have your sent items with you without CC’ing yourself. Now you can whip out your Pocket PC in a meeting and say “I sent you an email about that three days ago, so don’t sit there and say you didn’t know anything about it” and proceed to read it to them.
By Ed Hansberry on Wednesday, October 23, 2002
October 12th, 2007 — Articles
If you don’t know what gapless playback is then you probably don’t have any CDs that require it. There are some CDs and genres of music that require it. Basically, the CD is one long track but it is divided into several “songs.” There is no break between them though and you really can’t listen to them in any order other than how they were put on the CD. The track listing may be for convenience, but it really isn’t necessary. You can read more on gapless playback here if you want to get more technical about it.
When Windows Media Player on your desktop, as well as most ripping programs, rips the CD, it creates a separate WMA, or MP3, file for each song. On your desktop, this isn’t a problem as WMP supports gap-less playback. You won’t be able to tell when it moves from one track to the next. Your Pocket PC is a different matter. There is a light pause between songs, something that you can’t tell 99% of the time since each song on most CDs stands on its own. When playing back these continuous CDs though, the gap is unnerving to say the least and can totally ruin the CD for you.
So I am going to show you how to create a gapless WMA file using software included on every Windows XP machine sold. For my example, I will be using Windows XP, Windows Media Player 9 (also works with the newer WMP10) and Windows Movie Maker 2. The latter two are available as free upgrades for Windows XP from Microsoft’s Windows Update site in the “Windows XP” section, right below the “Critical Updates” section. I understand that there may be third party alternatives for doing this and I recommend you investigate those if you will do a lot of this. I currently have two CDs I am interested in doing this for and installing extra software for something I will hopefully only do once for each of these two CDs seems like overkill.
First, rip your CD. I recommend re-ripping it for this even if you already have it on your hard drive, but turn up the copying bitrate to the new “Windows Media Audio Lossless” format, which will require up to 500MB per CD. Some of you may already be using a lossless format for your PC audio needs. If so, you can start with files already on your hard drive.
Figure 1: Rip your music at the highest bitrate possible. This is in the Tools|Options dialog box in Windows Media Player.
The reason you need to do this is your music will get downsized at least one more time before it makes it to your Pocket PC, maybe twice, so the higher you start with, the better. Also note I have disabled the “Copy protect music” box, also known as “Check me and you’ll hate it because sometime down the road the music you rip will be unplayable” box. If this is copy protected with a DRM license file, you may not be able to continue. Finally, pay attention to the folder this is going to be stored in. You’ll need to know that in a few minutes. Windows Media Player generally records it in the folder listed in Figure 1, then in a subfolder with the artist’s name, then the CD name, then the tracks below that. I am going to do this with David & Diane Arkenstone’s “Echos of Egypt” CD, so my music will ultimately be in E:\My Music\Diane & David Arkenstone\Echoes of Egypt.
Now that you have ripped this music, you are ready to concatenate it, or make it one long track. Start Windows Movie Maker 2. Select the “Import audio or music” link, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Import your newly ripped music into Windows Movie Maker.
Next, navigate to the folder your CD was ripped to and select all of the songs then press the “Import” button.
Figure 3: Selecting the songs to import.
Once they are imported, you should be looking at a window similar to Figure 4. It shouldn’t take but a few seconds to import an hour’s worth of music. This CD only has 5 tracks total, each 10-15 minutes long. You may have more.
Figure 4: Your music files in Windows Movie Maker 2.
Now, click and drag all of the music down to the timeline in Windows Movie Maker to the Audio/Music row. You may need to click the “Show Timeline” button mid-way down the screen if the Storyboard is being shown.
Figure 5: Joining your files
You can drag them around in the timeline to make sure they are in the right order. Now you are ready to create your single WMA file. Be very careful that they don’t overlap at all in the timeline or you’ll get an ad hoc crossfade. Select File|Save Movie File in Windows Movie Maker 2, select My Computer and click Next. Name the file and select the folder you want to save it in. I just leave it in the My Videos folder. I am going to delete it later anyway.
Figure 6: Saving the “movie” file - it will really be a WMA audio file.
Select the “Best Fit To File Size” option. WMM2 will automatically pick the biggest file size it is capable of generating. Selecting any other choices will cause the file to be smaller, which may not be desirable. When Windows Movie Maker is done making the file, check the “Play movie when I click finish” box and press the “Finish” button. You will now be able to listen to the long single file in Windows Media Player.
Now you are ready to transfer the CD to your Pocket PC. If you are ok with the larger file and your ears are more discerning, you can manually copy the file over to your Pocket PC at this point. If you need to save some space or if you are like me and ok with 64kb-128kb bitrates, you can dock your Pocket PC and let Windows Media Player shrink the file for you. Select Tools|Options to get the Options dialog box shown in figure 6 below.
Figure 7: Configuring Windows Media Player to transcode your file to a smaller format for your Pocket PC.
Now simply let Windows Media Player transfer the file to your Pocket PC. It will first go through a transcoding process and then will do the actual file transfer. Be patient as it is a huge file and will take even the fastest PC a few minutes to convert.
That’s all there is to it! Hopefully in the future Microsoft will allow for true gapless playback in the Pocket PC version of Windows Media Player which will eliminate the need for these steps. One benefit to this though is the playlist is simple - one file. There is no need to worry about getting the songs in the wrong order.
By Ed Hansberry on Monday, October 4, 2004
