Optimizing Windows Movie Maker Video for Pocket PC Devices
Published: November 18, 2002
By Galan Bridgman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
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You can do some amazing things with digital video in Windows XP, such as making home movies to carry on a Pocket PC. In this column, I'll help you optimize video for the Pocket PC, using video creation tools available from Microsoft. Using Windows Movie Maker, the movie creation application included with Windows XP, is the easiest way to make your own videos to play on your Pocket PC. It's not a high-end tool designed for professionals, but you can use it to create videos encoded for viewing on a mobile device with limited power, such as a Pocket PC.
Why would you want video on your Pocket PC? Although it's possible to fit a full-length movie on a Pocket PC if you have a large flash memory card or a microdrive installed, that isn't a viewing experience I'd want to make a habit of. The movie would be about 160 MB in size, and the quality would pale in comparison to that offered by a portable DVD player. Here are some scenarios where I think video on a Pocket PC does make sense:
| • | Subjects that are of highly sentimental value, such as videos of your spouse or children. |
| • | Advertising videos, including movie trailers broadcast to movie theater customers standing in line trying to decide which movie to see. |
| • | Live TV, such as breaking news stories, received wirelessly while you are on the move. |
| • | Local informational videos, such as at a very large convention center, where you need help finding services, or locations, or features of the show you're attending. |
I'll also explain how to tweak your video for viewing on a Pocket PC by making custom profiles using Windows Media Encoder 7, a free download from Microsoft. When your video is polished, learn how to transfer it to your device and set it for optimal playback to wow your friends.
In the figure below, Windows Media Player 8 for the Pocket PC 2002 is playing a standard-sized video.
Figure 1
Making Videos with Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is included with Windows XP. If you're not familiar with using Movie Maker, I strongly suggest you read my earlier column, Moviemaking 101, for some basic tips that I won't cover here. Instead, I'll be taking a closer look at the encoding profiles Windows Movie Maker includes to make content for Pocket PC devices.
The secret to making your content play effectively on portable devices is using the right encoding profile. A profile is a collection of settings applied to your content during the encoding process in order to achieve an intended result. The profile includes the audio and video codecs used during encoding, plus output video size, audio sampling rate, target bit rate, and other information.
Note: Before starting, make sure you've upgraded Movie Maker to version 1.2, because it includes several profile updates. This update is available from Windows Update.
With Movie Maker open, start by creating a project and one or more empty collections. Now import some existing content into your collection or capture some new content. Two of my previous columns cover how to capture content, Capturing Video from Analog Sources and Capturing Video from Digital Sources.
You should always choose higher quality source content than your intended quality for the final video product. So if you're capturing from a DV-enabled camcorder, the DV-AVI quality setting in the Record dialog box is a good choice. The file captured to your disk will be large, but you can remove it after your video production work is completed.
Lay out your source content on the timeline and play back the movie you've made to be sure it's what you want. Then follow these steps:
1. | On the File menu, click Save Movie. |
2. | In the Setting box, click Other. |
3. | In the Profile list, choose one of the three PDA profiles.  Figure 2 |
After selecting a profile, look at the Video Profile settings to see how your video will be encoded. My advice would be to perform this step three times, encoding your movie in each profile and testing the results on your Pocket PC. At least until you become familiar with the results you can expect from each profile.
If you can't quite find a profile that yields results you like, perhaps you're ready to create a custom profile. In preparation for that, save a finished copy of your movie to a new file, using the highest quality used by any of your source media. DV-AVI, for example, if you used that.
Creating Your Own Profiles
Movie Maker has its own set of profiles, which the user is not able to modify. But Windows Media Encoder 7, another encoding tool from Microsoft, allows you to create custom profile settings. It's not included with Windows XP, but you can download Windows Media Encoder 7.
Windows Media Encoder 7 was designed for completely different purposes than Movie Maker, but it is capable converting or transcoding an existing video into another format, and that's exactly the functionality we're looking for. The Encoder includes a tool called the Profile Manager. This tool allows you to clone an existing profile and then make your own modifications to it.
Figure 3
Modifications to a profile can produce results that are either better than the original or disastrously worse. Microsoft's engineers worked hard to create profiles that balanced all the factors involved in a video's playback performance and the viewer's perceived quality. But sometimes the factory-shipped profiles can be improved upon.
Start by making small changes, such as lowering the frame rate from 20 to 18 frames per second, for example. This will free up 10% of the bandwidth (2 of every 20 frames) that can be utilized by the video encoder to increase the quality of each frame. This technique would not work as well on the 150 Kbps profile, as it is already set for a barely acceptable 8 frames per second.
Important adjustments can be made to Individual Video Stream Settings in the Profile Editor Wizard. In this dialog box, found in Step 8 in the procedure that follows, you can provide hints to the video encoder about whether you are primarily looking for smoothness or high frame quality. Use the sliding scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being the smoothest video and 100 being the highest quality.
Here's a step-by-step guide for making a custom profile:
1. | Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Windows Media, and then click Windows Media Encoder. If the Welcome to Windows Media Encoder dialog box opens, click Cancel. |
2. | On the Tools menu, click Manage Profiles. The Manage Profiles dialog box lists all the profiles the Encoder can use, including the ones you create. You'll notice the list here is a little different than the list used by Movie Maker. |
3. | Select one of the Video for color PDA devices profiles, and then click Copy. |
4. | Name the new profile you're going to create, which might be just a modification of the existing name. Click OK. |
5. | Click Edit. Unless you want to modify the description, this dialog box probably needs no change. Click Next. |
6. | The Audience Selection dialog box probably needs no modification unless you intend to dramatically modify the bit rate, which you might do for a significantly difference device, such as an XScale device. Click Next. |
7. | In Common Stream Settings, you can select the audio and video codecs, audio format, and video size. Adjust these values up or down as desired. If you want to try out a smaller video size, for example, you can achieve a higher frame rate and/or quality. Click Next. |
8. | In the Individual Video Stream Settings dialog box, you can select a different number of frames if you think your Pocket PC's CPU has either too much time on its hands, or too little horsepower to play your encoded videos smoothly. You can also nudge the encoder towards creating smoother motion or a clearer image. There are no guarantees here. Ultimately everything is still governed by the codec's capabilities and limitations within the constraints of the other parameters. Total media bit rate, for example, is a hard value that is strictly maintained. Click Next when you've made your changes.  Figure 4 |
9. | The final window is a summary of your choices for your review. If everything looks good, click Finish. Or click Back to correct a setting. Then click Close. |
After your new profile is created you can create a new encoding session by clicking Session, and then New. Experiment on your own to create a session. The basic idea is to select your source file, select a profile, and set your output file path. Use the high-quality video you saved in the section above as your input source. After your session is created, click Start to begin the transcoding process. When completed, some statistics will be displayed and you can then play back the resulting file and transfer it to your Pocket PC for viewing.
Note: If you create custom profiles that are worth saving and you want to back them up, don't look in your My Documents folder. They're stored in C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\Profiles. They have .prx extensions, and are standard XML files viewable with Notepad, in case you're curious about what goes into them.
Transferring Video Content from PC to Pocket PC
Typical bit rates for video targeted for Pocket PC devices run from 150 Kbps on the low end to 225 Kbps on the high end. You can adjust this in your custom profiles, but lowering it will probably result in unacceptable video quality, and raising it can cause playback performance to suffer. Taking a middle figure of 190 Kbps as an average bit rate, we can see that this results in files that are approximately 1.4 MB per minute of video. These files are considerably larger than what is commonly transferred to your device during normal synchronization operations. Transferring files this large can be very slow. What options do you have?
There are two primary methods and five typical connection types. The methods are ActiveSync, which is used for most interactivity between a Pocket PC device and a PC, and straight network connectivity using network shares, just as that used by PCs in a networked environment.
You can download ActiveSync 3.5 and read how to use it in Barb Bowman's column, Have I Got Connections!
Either one of these methods will work for transferring video files. However, it's the connection types that determine whether you'll find the speed acceptable or painfully slow. Infrared and serial connections are the slowest and 10/100 network cards are the fastest, with USB and 802.11b connections falling in the middle. My recommendation is to use whatever is the fastest method available to you, avoiding infrared and serial entirely.
Another good option is to write your videos to flash memory cards and then insert them into your device. You may be storing your videos on these cards anyway, since it's unlikely you'll have sufficient main memory for files of this size. If you do this, placing the files in either the root directory of the card or in the My Documents folder will make them display automatically in the Select dialog box of your device's Windows Media Player.
Playing Video on Your Pocket PC
Windows Media Player for Pocket PC is a standard component of the Pocket PC operating system. Devices running Pocket PC 2002 come with Windows Media Player for Pocket PC 8 pre-installed. Older devices that were upgraded to the Pocket PC 2002 OS can get the updated player by installing it from the upgrade CD.
Although Media Player can crop the edges off a video that is too large for the display screen, or scale it to size, this results in a viewing experience that is sub-optimal. The two preferred sizes for videos targeted for the Pocket PC are 208 x 160 pixels, which fits nicely within Media Player's window in skin mode, and 320 x 240 pixels for full-screen mode.
The user has control over how Media Player deals with oversized videos. To find these options on your Pocket PC:
| • | Click Tools on the Media Player toolbar, then click Settings, and then click Audio & Video. |
Here you can choose when Media Player goes into full screen mode, whether or not to rotate the video 180, and what action to take on oversized videos if the Full screen selection did not fully address the issue.
Looking at Windows Media 9 Series
A new generation of even higher-quality video encoding is about to enter the scene: Windows Media 9 Series. In public beta now, Windows Media 9 Series brings improved video encoding quality on multiple fronts. The video codec has been enhanced and an important feature called two-pass encoding is now a standard option for offline encoding scenarios. Two-pass encoding looks at all your video frames twice, with the first pass gathering statistics that will help the second pass do a better encoding job.
I must say that I was unable to achieve the same quality of results using the provided PDA profiles and the default settings in the September beta release of Windows Media Encoder 9 as I was with Windows Media Encoder 7, but I'm sure this will change before the product is final.
Additionally, you cannot use the new Windows Media 9 video codec for PDA content until the new Windows Media Player for Pocket PC comes out. This new player will have significant performance enhancements for both StrongArm and XScale devices.
I'm very optimistic about the current state of the Windows Media technology. As you can see from my bio, I've been in this business a long time, and Windows Media 9 Series represents one of the biggest single advances in the technology that I've ever seen.
Galan Bridgman is a developer, architect, and enthusiast for digital media technologies. He co-developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. At Starlight Networks he developed innovative client and backend technologies using ActiveMovie® and NetShow® Server, the precursors to Windows Media Technology. He is a full-time consultant, and is currently developing a next-generation, fully-automated radio station using Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series technologies. After hours he enjoys showing others how to make the most of Microsoft's latest Windows Media applications. Check Galan's Web site for more information about him.
