Making Videos for the Palm Handheld

I’d like to mention how I encode videos to put on my Palm Tungsten E2. It’s really fast and easy, and the output video quality is near-perfect, while its size is not that big.

You’ll need ‘VirtualDub’ or ‘VirtualDubMod’ to modify the videos before putting them on your E2- both are free. I use ‘VirtualDubMod’. You’ll need TCPMP as the player.

Screenshots added August 15, 2006

1. Open the video in ‘VirtualDubMod’. The version I use is 1.5.10.1

Note the red-marked titles. These are the main titles you’ll be using.

2. Click ‘Video’ on the upper tab then ‘Filters’. Click ‘Add’. Browse the list for ‘Resize’. Type in the dimensions e.g. 320 x 240. [It is recommended that you calculate the W x H thing to keep it uniform first]. Choose ‘Precise Bilinear’ in ‘Filter Mode’. Click OK.

3. Click ‘Video’ on the upper tab then ‘Frame Rate’. Choose ‘Process every other frame (decimate by 2)’ to decrease filesize. Click OK. You can ignore this step if you want to keep the original frame rate.

4. Click ‘Video’ on the upper tab then ‘Compression’. Scroll down to ‘Xvid MPEG-4 Codec’. Click ‘Configure’. The ‘Encoding Type’ is ‘Single Pass’ and the ‘Target Quantizer’ equals to 3.50. Decrease this value for better quality. Click OK.

5. Click ‘Streams’ on the upper tab then ‘Stream list’. Right-click on the grey bar having the audio properties and click ‘Full Processing Mode’. Right-click on it again and then click on ‘Compression’. Choose ‘MPEG Layer-3′. Choose ‘16/16 Kbits Mono’ or ‘16/8 kbits Mono’. Choose higher values for better audio quality. Click OK. [P.S. In other versions of VDM or VD, you might find an Audio tab instead of Streams]

6. Click ‘File’ then ‘Save As..’. Choose the output file destination, and then wait for the process to be finished.

That’s it! Enjoy! I know it might seem hard from the first look, but try it and you’ll find it so easy.

Tip: Do I need to do that everytime I want to upload a video to my Palm?
Not necessarily. You see the screenshot above? You see Save processing settings… option? It’s that. Save your settings after you follow this guide, and when you need to do another video, get your saved file via Load processing settings… (P.S. Not fully comptaible though. Some settings randomly do not get saved, but it’s worth a try though).