Using Windows Media Encoder to watch video on a PPC

Contributed by enzoweb August 2, 2004  
Tagged: Pocket PC

Windows Media Encoder can encode a video for watching on a Pocket PC in about 4 clicks. The resulting file is reasonably sized and the quality is very good.

Download the Windows Media Encoder for Free at several sites, here is one found with Google : http://www.soft32.com/download_980.html.

Install it and run it. It should start by opening up a Wizard dialogue. Click on the ‘convert a file’ option, then OK.

It will then ask for a source and target file. Browse to the relevant files and click Next.

Select ‘Pocket PC’ from the Content distribution list, and click Next.

If you want to view the video in Portrait mode, click ‘Next’ at the ‘Encoding Options’ dialogue. I prefer to view them in Landscape mode, and you can select this from the ‘Video’ dropdown box. You can let the rest default and click ‘Next’.

You can fill in details of the clip if you like at the ‘Display Information’ dialogue, I don’t normally bother. Click Next.

There will be a ‘Settings Review’ screen, click Finish and the program will begin to encode the video.

The amount of time it takes obviously depends on the size of the original clip. It does a couple of passes.

A 350Mb AVI file converted to a 78Mb WMV file.

Once converted, copy it to a storage card for viewing on the PPC, using Activesync or a card reader.