The biggest change upon moving from my powerhouse Axim to the solid TyTN was movie-watching. Gone were the days of dragging and dropping whole .avi’s onto the SD card and enjoying a movie in Coreplayer or TCPMP. The TyTN just couldn’t handle VGA resolution video, and the sound kept skipping like a game of hopscotch. I tried encoding my own videos with some tutorials, but I lost all of my encoders and fancy pants software when my old hard drive died.

Thank god for software like Mobile DVD then. Ideally you can  just download it, click a couple of times, and watched a movie. I’ve tried software like this before, but how well does SPB’s fare?

Installation and Trial

There’s nothing to install on your PDA except for the video files you want to watch. Mobile DVD is compatible with 2000/XP/Vista editions of Windows. Upon installation you activate the 14-day trial. The trial is a rather restrictive one, allowing only half-length conversions of your movies, and integrating nag screens into the converted videos. This is rather different from other SPB software trials, which tend to be full versions until the trial period runs out.

Step One — Source Selection

Once you’ve got the program installed and launched, you’re then presented with this dialogue:

Converting a DVD

Choosing to convert a DVD is simple. You can start up Mobile DVD manually or just insert a DVD into your disc drive (and a pop-up will allow you to convert with SPB’s program). Here’s the first screen you’ll be presented with:

The instructions at this point are very simple. Wait for the DVD window on the right to activate, start the movie using the window, and press next. Not too hard, right?

This is all fine if you’re just converting a movie, but how about those DVDs you have of favourite series? If you’ve got a Cowboy Bebop DVD in the drive with four episodes on the disc it’s still quite simple. Simply navigate to the episodes menu of the DVD, select an episode to play, and then click next. Clicking Play up front would do the same thing…but it would only play the first episode for you.

Another cool part about this process is how easy it is to activate sub-titles. Since you’re basically navigating the DVD like you would on any normal player, all you need to do to add sub-titles to your encoded video is turn them on in the setup menu on your DVD.

Converting a video file

This portion is a lot simpler. You just have to find the file you want to convert on your hard disk and go on to the next step.

Step Two — Part to Convert

Once the content has been chosen, SPB allows you to choose how much or how little you might want to convert. If you only want that cool title sequence of Cowboy Bebop, you can actually manually select which portions of video to process. I always just ended up choosing to convert the whole “movie” (everything is a movie in this program ) for some on-the-go ass kicking.

Step Three –  File Format and Resolution

Every dialogue up until this point has been a training exercise. This is where true mobile enthusiasts have to step their game up and really show the program how much they know about their device, or suffer the consequences (not really).

The first drop-down list lets you choose from the file format. Videos are converted using codecs, and different players support different codecs. WMP10 Mobile supports .wmv and TCPMP/Coreplayer support…well, pretty much everything. I’ve been brainwashed into using XVid as my codec of choice, but users who just use Windows Media Player mobile will have to use .wmv. If all of this confuses, don’t worry. SPB actually shows you the names of the compatible mobile players in brackets beside the names of the format.

The next step is choosing a resolution. Chances are you’ll know what resolution your PPC is, so choosing the resolution should be easy. What might have been just a bit easier in this dialogue would be the re-ordering of the options, so that screen sizes were listed from smallest to largest. If people really don’t know the screen sizes or anything about screen resolution, then the process probably looks a lot more scary than it is. The easiest way to find out your resolution is just to google the name of your own device alongside the word “specs”. Then you’ll have every geeky site on the internet (likely including our own!) telling you what resolution your screen is. Ta da!

Our third drop-down list lets us select the aspect ratio. There are three choices, one of which confuses me greatly. The first two are 4:3 (like what we see on non-HDTV) and 16:9 (for movies and HDTV). The third option is a 2.35:1, which I have never even heard of outside of this program. Perhaps SPB could put some information in parentheses again, like they did for the output file format. In any case, I usually had a choice of aspect ratios when converting DVDs, but I found the ratio to be locked when converting most of my videos on the hard drive. It must just depend on how your videos were encoded in the first place.

The final portion of this dialogue concerns the cropping of the video. This is really up to personal preference. You don’t need any technical know-how, you just need to be realistic about your screen size. The sizes available are small, medium, and big (oh SPB, you’re pulling a fast one! I thought you’d say “large”!). If you’re watching on a QVGA screen or smaller, please do yourself a favour and make the picture as large as possible You’ll lose some details, but you’ll keep your sanity.

Step Four — Quality or size?

Step four is really more of a philosophical question than it is a step in video conversion. Are you an unrelenting perfectionist who will stop at no maximum file size to achieve the best quality? Or are you the conservative type, rationing only a portion of your ROM or storage card for “entertainment” and not a megabyte more?

But people aren’t absolutes, right? You’ve got your conservative perfectionists, too . Don’t worry, SPB thought of you as well. That’s why there’s a slider for video quality to help you compromise between the two extremes of quality and size.

Step Five — Output File

So now that you’re ready to convert your file, where do you want it to end up? You can put it on your hard drive, memory card, or even shoot it to your Pocket PC over USB. My TyTN has 128 MB of ROM, a lot of which is taken up by the OS, so I never used the “transfer to Pocket PC” although I imagine users with 1Gb of ROM will end up using that option often.

Step Six  — Almost there!

As you can see here, the estimated time to convert a 24 min episode of Cowboy Bebop to QVGA XVid at Best Quality is around eight minutes. You can also get a live preview of the conversion process so you can immediately see what kind of quality you’ll get while you wait. But hold on…what’s this?

Actually, the time is really around four minutes — half of the original estimated time. I’ve got a pretty powerful machine, so the results will really vary based on your computer, but let me tell you — it takes a LOT longer for me to convert videos for my iPhone using Videora, so a four-minute conversion time is a godsend. There’s also a checkbox during conversion to turn your computer off after the process finishes, but the program is so fast I think most users can do conversions an hour or so before they head out and still have time to enjoy a movie on the road.

The 24-minute episodes are originally 177 MB or so at VGA (640×480) resolution, so cutting the file size in half for QVGA is pretty awesome. A 720×480 two-hour movie (700 MB) I had previously ripped took 11:35 to convert and ended up at around 442 MB at best quality QVGA XVid. Great results all around.

Step Seven — Turn off lights, prepare Popcorn!

Ok, let me just start this section off by saying PDAs and popcorn just do not mix well. But once you’ve managed to wipe all the butter off of your screen, you’ll find the image and sound from SPB to be perfectly in sync and as crystal clear as you could ask for at the resolution you chose.

I watched a few of my old movies on DVD as well as a quarter of my Cowboy Bebop collection and never experienced a hitch. I did have some audio skipping when using Coreplayer to play the files back, but I blame that on Coreplayer (I checked the files on my computer and the sound was always in sync).

The only major drawback to this program is its lack of batch conversion capability. You have to wait until an episode finishes converting until you can start the next one going. The conversions do finish quickly, but there are times I’d want to convert two movies before heading out for a weekend, but I’d have to babysit the computer to start the second process….manually. The rest of the interface is done so well, it’s almost surprising this feature was left out, especially considering the price tag of $25. If I pay that much for a piece of software, I want it to do its job as well and as efficiently as possible.

However, even with that one oversight (I call it that, but they might have some reason they haven’t yet explained) taken into consideration, SPB Mobile DVD is still a great piece of software. It’s harder to judge from the limited trial version, but the full version really delivers. I’d love if they could knock $5 off the price, or at least add batch conversion, but as it stands, it’s an extremely user-friendly video converter. It streamlines the whole conversion process so that I can get to watching my movies as quickly and easily as possible. I can’t ask anything more from SPB than that.

Critical Info

Developer: Spb Software

Price: $24.95

Availability: JAMM Store