Today it is no secret that in most cases, people who buy yourself a PDA, prefer devices that run on Palm OS. However, when it comes to increasing the capacity of operating systems, few would argue that the Palm OS is at the end of the list. As a 16-bit OS, it is clearly inferior to devices on platforms of Windows CE or EPOC. One drawback is the lack of Palm multimedia. Windows CE devices can play video files recorded on the IBM microdrive. But can it Palm? Probably not. And the main reason for the lack of such opportunities lies in the fact that the PalmOS has always been the operating system for advanced organizers and more. Software product gMovie Maker of Generic Media, as its creators say, "breathe" new life into old Palm Pilot'y. In conjunction with gMovie Player it will turn Palm into a multimedia device. Author of this article has tested the program. Here is a brief report about it.
gMovie Maker
gMovie Maker - an application that converts the color video, animation and the usual image format gMovie for viewing on the devices, Palm OS. Surprising that gMovie Maker can convert almost all popular media file types. See for yourself, here is a list of supported file format: Animatsiya: GIF, Macromedia Flash, FLC Images: BMP, JPEG, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, Targa, TIFF Video: AVI, DV, MPEG-1, Quicktime is quite an impressive structure. The first thing that tasted author of the article - Macromedia Flash files with the extension. Swf. The conversion process, he said, could not be easier. Opening the application, he chose the file to your hard drive. Then made a few necessary facilities. Incidentally, one of the options allows you to select the number of colors of the converted file, it can be in color, black and white or have 4 or 16 shades of gray. You can also set and the image size in pixels. Now all that remains - this is to click "convert" ("convert") - and a few seconds. Swf file size is 75Kb will be converted to 12Kb. Pdb. The test program was conducted by the author on a Pocket PC IBM WorkPad c3, which is a version of IBM-Palm V with 2 MB of memory, so that the color here can be no question. Tester converted Flash-file. Pdb with 16 shades of gray, and now, to reproduce the image need gMovie Player.
gMovie Player
First you must install gMovie Player on a PDA. Following this simple procedure, open the application "Install Tool", choose our. Pdb file for transmission and sends it to the Pocket PC. Open the application gMovie Player, converted file appears in the list. Clicking on it will start playing Flash-animations. According to the author, play "works" exclusively. It is true there is no sound, no color, but the image still is not much different from that which would be on the desktop. Animation is striking in its smoothness, and graphics - cleanliness. Besides, the author tested the video files, AVI and Quicktime. They, too, everything went perfectly.
Other thoughts ..
Another potential problem that may face the owners of most of the Palm 's may be the lack of memory. Even the latest models are equipped with only 8MB. Generic Media, realizing this problem, create gMovie Player "weight" of 73 KB. Even on the test WorkPad c3 with 2 MB of the author was able to enjoy the pictures and some video files. However, for full-size files still need to expand the memory. In the case of the latest models of PDAs, this problem can be solved. For example, for the Handspring Visor, you can use an adapter MemPlug SmartMedia. Expansion Modules Springboard, SmartMedia cards can increase your memory to 64 MB Visor'a. And more .. gMedia Player does not support audio. However, this is due to disabilities Palm'ov, and not with the software gMedia. It is possible that this problem will be solved soon. Related Links:
- gMovie Maker English Windows (v1.0)
- gMovie Maker English Macintosh (v1.0)
- gMovie Player English (v1.1.2)
Sources, Materials: