DVD to Pocket PC

Hello again, it’s been quite a while since I’ve taken  a look at any video conversion software, but I’m back today with one that’s fairly easy to use and relatively inexpensive for what it offers and can do.

The software is called DVD to Pocket PC and it does exactly what it sound like, it converts DVDs to pocket PC format, and my Tilt is is what would be considered a pocket PC, along with the other phones we cover on this site.

I love movies, not many out there don’t I’m sure, it’s probably one of our biggest pastimes or waste-of-times we all participate in, but their nice to help us relax and just get away from the troubles of everyday life. With our phones, especially smartphones, we can now take our music and movies with us, but to do that we’ve got to mage them a bit smaller and compatible with our devices, there’s many choices out there to do this, but continue on to learn about one decent choice, DVD to Pocket PC.

First up let’s take a look at some information about the software taken from their site:

DVD to Pocket PC

The award-winning, bestselling software ‘DVD to Pocket PC’, has once again been improved. With new features and more speed. DVD-to-Pocket PC allows you to watch not only DVDs, but also home movies, downloaded content and other video files on your Windows Mobile phone. Turn your phone into a Pocket Movie Player. DVD conversions are up to 4 times faster in the new version. In less than 45 minutes, you can put a full movie on your phone. Now supports the new hi-res devices such as the HTC Touch Pro2, Sony Ericsson Experia and Toshiba TG01.

Critics and consumers love our intuitive two-click interface. Because our software is much easier to use than other products, we won two prestigious awards. Take your DVDs on the plane, train or automobile, watch them on vacation, at work or at school. With only two clicks, this PC software automatically converts the content of your DVD, or a video file on the harddrive to a super small movie file, which will play on any Windows Mobile device, such as HP iPaq, HTC phones and any other brand and model. from a postage stamp size memory card.

On a 2Gb card (street price $5.00), you can store 15 feature films or 20 hours of TV or Youtube programming ! And after watching those you can put new content on it, over and over again.

Version 6.0 of the software has many features:

– Rip any DVD, including copy-protected movies
– Conversion of AVI, MPEG, and DivX source files
– Fit-to-Card option (auto-adjust quality to the size of the memorycard)
– Variable quality video slider, with 5 levels of user control
– Variable quality audio slider, up to stereo CD quality sound
– Convert chapters or whole movie
– Assign any drive as the temporary disk
– 400% faster on most PCs
– New, easier wizard style user interface
– Move video back and forth between memorycard and PC

Only $ 19.95 incl. free upgrades and support

as with my other reviews of this type of product, I used my Stargate Ultimate Edition DVD, this way you can compare the times to the other software I’ve reviewed.

After installing the software, double click the icon and you’re ready to go, the interface is very basic, which is nice.

There are several drop down menu choices across the top, but there’s not much there really, just basic stuff.

Now once you’re ready to go you’ll click ‘Open. to open the navigation widow to find your DVD that you want to transfer to your device. Simple really, it’s the familiar tree style navigation that we’re all accustomed to.

After that you can select ‘Action’ to start the conversion, or click ‘Advanced’ to change the settings around a bit if you wish like resolution (screen size), quality and subtitles.

I’ve got a 16gb card in my Tilt so I don’t care too much about space, so of course I set the audio and video quality to maximum

It takes three steps to convert your DVD to be able to play on your phone, first is ripping, then encoding, and step three isn’t labeled, not sure what it’s doing, but it’s doing something. During the ripping period we see it utilizes two cores, I’ve got a quad core PC, and Task Manager shows 50% usage.

When it’s encoding though we see that CPU usage jumps up to 89%, so it looks as though this software can utilize quad cores, at least for that part of it.

Here’s the step three screenshot:

For my computer, with Intel C2q9650 and 8gigs of ram, the process took a little over 30 minutes, depending on your system the time will be different of course.

When it’s complete you’ve got the option to immediately transfer it to your microSD card, I didn’t have mine hooked up so I got an error, no big deal though you can transfer it later as I did.

The size of the completed file was only 443MB, which is not bad really, at least for me since I’ve got 16gigs of space 😉

I opened up the output folder and found not only the completed movie but all the other parts as well that were part of the ripping and conversion process, why they remained I’m not sure, it would be nice if they were deleted once the job was complete, but you’ll have to go in and delete those files to free up space on your PC if you need to.

Overall it’s not a bad piece of software really, it’s very easy to use, and works basically all by itself with little user input. You can go in and change some settings which is nice.

The file on my phone played perfectly, the audio and video were synced perfectly, so that of course is a good thing, and 30 minutes to convert the DVD isn’t too bad really.

Of course you’ve got to remember I converted my movie on maximum settings for audio and video, so if you lower those settings a bit the time to convert and the output file size will be smaller or shorter.

For $19.95 I think it’s worth it if you like to take your movies with you, and considering it includes upgrades and tech support, it’s well worth it. I can recommend this software easily, it works and it’s easy to use.