How we tested

Taking your video with you can be tricky…

The most effective way of testing the versatility of our portables was to try them out with today's popular video formats. Could they all play back a DVD movie? How would they cope with a downloaded film trailer? Was there support for streaming video? By throwing a variety of video types and formats at a laptop, portable DVD player, portable video player, Sony PSP, PDA and a smartphone, we weren't just testing performance – we were also testing ease-of-use.

Our test video consisted of the following media: House of Flying Daggers (DVD); Star Wars: Clone Wars (recorded TV episode, stored on Foxtel); movie trailers from an online site such as www.apple.com/trailers or http://windowsmedia.com (streaming video); The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer (a 51MB 640 x 480 QuickTime file downloaded from www.movie-list.com); and the 720p high definition Coral Reef Adventure clip from www.wmvhd.com (HD video).

Obviously, not all of the devices here can play all of the content in their native formats – ie, a PSP can't play back a DVD. But, with some clever file transfer, file transcoding and/or file compression, it's possible to take the original video and adapt it to run on each different device.
To this end, we also required some extra hardware and software. We used a Philips DVR 880 DVD recorder to burn recorded TV on to a DVD+R disc, enabling Clone Wars to be watched on the laptop and portable DVD player. Another way of getting video from the Foxtel box (you could use a DVD recorder, Freeview HDD PVR or even a VHS VCR instead) was to employ an MPEG video encoder. We tried the AverMedia EZMaker USB 2.0 video encoder for this, which is capable of capturing video via S-Video or composite into AVI or MPEG formats. It's simple and cheap, and consequently the results are satisfactory rather than stunning. Your best option would be to record programming directly on to a PC, using either a Media Center Edition machine or ShowShifter.

Finally, for video conversion and compression, we opted to convert video files into DivX using PocketDivXEncoder (http://divx.ppccool.com ). Meanwhile, BetaPlayer (http://betaplayer.c orecodec.org) was chosen to handle playback on the PDA and Smartphone devices.

LAPTOP

Sony Vaio VGN-S48GP| $3699 |www.sonystyle.com.au |

A laptop is easily the most flexible device here. Even bargain-bucket portables are now flogged with a DVD drive for movie playback, plus decent onboard sound and a high resolution 1,024 x 768 LCD panel. A 40GB hard disk will give you more than enough storage space for your digital audio, videos and photos, while the potential for wireless internet access (either integrated or via an add-in PC card), ensures that a laptop has the potential to tick all of our video boxes.

House of Flying Daggers? Tick. The DVD goes straight into the drive; the OS and related codec software take care of the rest. With a 13.3- to  15.4-inch widescreen display, a laptop offers by far the best viewing experience; earphones simply plug into the side for an effortless kick of pseudo surround. Laptops are such smug all-rounders that we can tick off the streaming video and downloaded trailer tests too. With an 802.11 connection, you can pipe down the latest movie clips from www.apple.com/trailers, while our downloaded Hitchhikers snippet needs no tiresome format conversion – with QuickTime installed, it runs immediately.

The recorded TV test, however, is less straightforward. The laptop doesn't have a problem running recorded video, but it's a convoluted process to get video on to its hard drive in the first place. The easiest option is to burn recordings on to disc via a DVD recorder, thereby making playback as undemanding as the House of Flying Daggers DVD test. The cost of DVD recorders has tumbled dramatically and they're an ideal companion box to a PVR or a replacement for your cobwebbed VCR. Other video transfer options to consider: a plug-in video encoder like AverMedia's EZMaker USB 2.0 or recording TV directly on to the laptop using an external TV capture card. See page 32 for more info.

Uniquely, thanks to the 1,280 x 800 pixel LCD on this Sony machine, it's the only device here that can handle HD movie clips. And with its X-Black display, it offers unparalleled clarity and colour reproduction.

But despite all its advantages, a laptop is still held back by its unwieldy size, and uncomfortably high heat output. Because the average laptop takes over a minute to power up and preload its essential widgetry, you can't just whip one out of a bag and start watching video right away. It has enough storage space, but battery life is always a concern, with some of the newer Intel machines unable to manage more than two-and-a-half hours per Li-Ion cell.

PORTABLE VIDEO PLAYER

|Archos AV420| $839 |www.worldtech.c om.au  |

From Walkman to Discman, MiniDisc to iPod, PVPs like the Archos AV420 represent the next leap forward for portable entertainment technology. Microsoft's Portable Media Centers may have a multi-million dollar marketing push behind them, but this multimedia player is a significantly better product. Not only is the AV420 an MP3/WMA jukebox, but it's also a DivX video player and recorder, a digital photo album, voice recorder and an external HD drive.

Consequently, the AV420 strikes a fine balance between the versatility of a laptop and the back-pocketability of a PDA. What it can't do is access any streaming video links (there's generally no Wi-Fi connectivity on a PVP) or display our HD video clip (the 720p WMV-HD file requires a minimum screen resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels). So this particular device is 2–0 down to the fat-assed laptop from the get-go.
But it makes a strong comeback. The key to happy portable video player ownership is to buy a device that ‘records' as well as plays back MPEG-4 video – and that rules out the pretty but dumb portable media center variety. The AV420's key feature is its integrated digital video recorder (DVR) module, which encodes any AV composite or S-Video input into MPEG-4 video on the fly. You simply hook up your VCR, PVR or DVD recorder, set the duration of a recording, and let the device do the rest. Better still, the AV420 has the potential to act as a PVR all on its own, enabling you to schedule recordings in just the same way. That's 2–1 and game on.

Without a DVD drive, the House of Flying Daggers DVD obviously won't play in the traditional sense, but there are ways around the problem. Either use the built-in DVR module to record the movie and convert it into MPEG-4 – the Archos will record our DVD, but the MacroVision copyright protection on the disc will restrict its playback to the AV420's own LCD. Or rip the DVD to a PC's hard disk using a DVD ripper, and convert it into DivX for portable playback. Both of these approaches are illegal in the eyes of the law, but the theory makes it 2–2.

Finally, run the QT Hitchhiker's trailer through PocketDivXEncoder and its new DivX format is instantly compatible with the Archos player (and most PVPs) – Windows Media Player 10 can auto-transcode the clip into a WMV file for PMC devices. Still keeping score? That makes it 3–2. The Archos wins.

PORTABLE DVD PLAYER

|Sony Dreamstation MV700HR| $999 |www.sony.com.au  |

Sony is a company frequently at the forefront of innovative design, and one that's capable of excellent build quality. So can this DVD portable live up to the trend?

The MVH-700 HR has obviously been designed with ease of use and aesthetics as priorities. The unit is sleek, with its disc tray hidden underneath the 7in screen, and the controls located neatly in the top of the unit.

Unfortunately the picture is rather uninspiring. There's a fair amount of noise to images, reducing the amount of details on offer. The panel lacks the black definition and detail in dark scenes that the best players here can deliver. The Sony's colours can be washed out or overblown, and this is hard to correct, due to the limited scope to tweak the picture in the Settings menu. On a positive note, motion scenes are handled with ease, with very little blocking or colour bleeding evident.

The sound is good: it gives the most testing scenes a convincing, solid soundstage. The built-in speakers aren't the best, but they provide a decent midrange and top-end, though with slightly lacklustre bass. A decent pair of headphones gives a great impression of what the Sony is capable of, and attaching it to your home cinema system will really make it sing – when playing via a full surround system, the Sony sounds awesome.

Sony has designed a solid in the MV-700HR. It looks and feels good in your hand. However, in the area that matters most – picture quality – it doesn't shine enough to make up for that high price.

PDA / POCKET PC

|Dell Axim X50v| $849 |www.dell.com.au  |

The death of the PDA has been on the cards for about a year now – its modern-day relevance continues to be eroded by progressively smarter mobile phones. But top-flight e-organisers are still grimly hanging on in there and, as many of them pack more processing power than a digital diary really needs, they've found an unexpected niche moonlighting as portable video players. See that guy with a PDA on the plane? He's more likely to be watching a DivX-encoded TV show or a ripped DVD movie than checking his appointments.

Like the Sony PSP, PDAs rely on flash-based memory for video file storage. So for successful video watching, you've got to be prepared to rip, decrypt, encode and transcode your video content. It's a black art – type ‘DVD ripper' into Google and there are hundreds of under-the-counter wares scattered around the web, enabling the House of Flying Daggers DVD to be transferred to a computer's hard disk and then re-encoded into DivX for PDA playback. File sizes for ripped video are typically chunky, but SD memory card sizes range from 16MB to 2GB.

The same goes for recorded TV, but again the key to ticking off this test is getting the video file on to a PC or Mac so that it can be compressed and re-encoded into a PDA-friendly format. Pocket PCs support Windows Media Video by default, but this isn't the most effective solution. The freeware BetaPlayer application (http://betaplayer.c orecodec.org) is a superb DivX player and, when partnered with PocketDivXEncoder, files can be quickly and easily transcoded and played. The ripped DVD can be viewed in this way, as can our recorded TV episode and the Hitchhiker's trailer.

The high definition test is obviously out, but a suitably connected PDA can already access videos and music online – head over to http://mobile.pocket movies.net or http://windowsmedia.com . Microsoft has also announced a new service at www.msnvideodownlo ads.com, offering video downloads for Portable Media Centers, PDAs and smartphones. A yearly sub of US$20 (AU$26) buys you daily clips of US-skewed news, kids and sports shows. It's hardly relevant to Australian users, but at least it's a start.
You've probably noticed that we've not mentioned Palm here. Palm PDAs like the Tungsten T5 are capable of displaying video – try the Kinoma video player (www.kinoma.com) – but Pocket PCs are easily the best at it. For optimum viewing, look for a handheld with a 640 x 480 pixel screen.

SONY PSP

|Sony PSP| $399 |www.sonystyle.c om.au  |

Hands-on play show the PSP to be an exceptionally capable video player. Thanks to its built-in UMD drive (and Sony's hefty Hollywood clout), there's already a substantial clutch of mini movie discs available; while its sharp 16:9 screen and MPEG-4 support give it all the benefits of a modern PVP.

What the PSP doesn't have is an internal hard disk drive, so video files need to be squeezed on to Memory Stick Duo cards. This isn't too much of a technical issue – PDA and Smartphone owners already watch video on the move in this way. But the process of encoding the video can seem intimidating for less experienced users. Helpfully, House of Flying Daggers is also available in the PSP's own UMD format, making playback as easy as popping in the disc and pressing ‘play'. But the test here is to watch the DVD (not buy a new one), and without a full-size drive or an integrated MPEG-4 encoder, the only option is to rip the contents and re-encode them into PSP-compliant .mp4 files using programs like 3GP Encoder or PSP Video 9.

By approaching video conversion in this way, the PSP completes the trailer element of our test with some style, re-encoding at 320 x 240 pixels for 30fps playback. It can also handle our recorded TV show, but you still need a way of getting the raw video on to a host computer and this can prove time-consuming. However, any ripping and re-encoding is certainly worth it – LCD brightness and clarity is excellent, eclipsing some of the more expensive PVPs and PDAs. But to fit the 111-minute House of Flying Daggers (1.4GB) on to a 1GB Memory Stick, you're forced to drop the frame rate down from 30fps to a coarser 15fps. Even a half-hour Simpsons episode will swallow 128MB in the 30fps mode.

With such a small screen, the high definition test is a waste of time, and in its current incarnation, the PSP can't handle streaming video either. But crucially, Sony has started selling an online-enabled PSP in Korea, which is capable of accessing local online movie services and streaming content.

SMARTPHONE

|i -mate SP3| $749 |www.clubimate.com.au  |

Although smartphones like the SPV C500 have the necessary muscle to forcibly tattoo a PDA with the word ‘obsolete', it doesn't make them ideal for watching TV shows or movies on the move. Like a Pocket PC, the C500 runs Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS, and its 200MHz processor is certainly speedy enough to crank along video footage. But compared to the 3.8-inch LCD on the Archos AV420 or the 4.3-inch screen on the new Sony PSP, the 2.5-inch 220 x 176 pixel panel on this mobile is positively titchy.

Most of the criticism levelled against portable video players is directed at the size of the screen. It can't replace the experience of enjoying a movie on a big TV, but for watching recorded TV and short film clips, the size of the screen is less of a problem. Of course, the advantage of such a dinky display resolution is that you can compress video files into significantly smaller sizes. For example, the Hitchhiker's trailer is 51MB in its native QT format, while re-encoding via PocketDivXEncoder squashes this down to 13MB for the Archos, 6MB for the Pocket PC and just over 3MB for the Windows smartphone.

Similarly, our 200MB Clone Wars episode could be squashed down to 31MB – both were played using the Smartphone version of the BetaPlayer application. This ruthless compression is undeniably handy, but as the C500 only packs 32MB of onboard storage, bolstered by a measly 16MB mini-SD card, it's ultimately useless – we still had to buy a bigger card. And hiding the SD interface beneath the battery might make the outer shell of the C500 look smooth and slick, but it also makes it unbearably fiddly when you want to swap one flash card for another.

Skipping past the HD test, our House of Flying Daggers DVD trial proved tricky. Getting the video onto the phone involves the same rip-and-be-damned approach that you'd use for the Pocket PC on the previous page. The included mini-SD card isn't large enough to hold the re-encoded 220 x 176 resolution DivX version (184MB), although you can pick up a 256MB card (£23) from online shops such as Expansys (www.expansys.com).

The only worry here is battery life – the C500 can happily play video for two hours or so, but unless you've got a spare battery, monopolising it in this way will leave your phone out of action for the rest of the day. Last, but not least, the C500 passes the streaming video test – but only just. Without Wi-Fi, content can only be accessed via the GPRS connection and this is sluggish at best. No doubt 3G-compatible smartphones will make a much better go of it.
 
Have video, can't travel?

Living in iPod's shadow, mobile video is more hobbyist than mainstream. What have we learned from all this? We've seen that the laptop is by far the best video all-rounder, but you'll need trousers with a 136-inch waist if you want to fit one in your pocket, and a spare battery or two would be handy. The portable DVD player puts in a gutsy performance and this might be the best option for the tech-beginner. But you'll need a DVD recorder to transfer your recorded TV to disc. The portable video player, meanwhile, successfully tiptoes along the tightrope between portability and performance, but make sure you get a model that ‘records' – Portable Media Centers may be slicker and easier to use, but to get any real joy out of them they scream like a girl to be used with a $2,500 Media Center PC.

While there's a satisfying transfer-and-go element to watching video on the laptop, PVP or portable DVD player, it gets more complicated for smaller devices. In short: if you want to watch video on a PSP, PDA or a smartphone, it will need to be re-encoded. Getting all our video content to run on a Pocket PC highlights the incompatibility between devices and video codecs. But it also shows the reluctance of content producers to let you take your TV and movie viewing with you, so much so that you're forced to find underground ways of doing so. True, Microsoft has set up video downloads on MSN, and Sony is umming-and-ahhing about an ‘iTunes for movies', but things aren't moving fast enough.

The Sony PSP, pocket PC and Smartphone devices desperately need to be paired with a PC, plus the appropriate software that will take care of the file encoding. An ideal setup would be a media PC running ShowShifter. With this you can record TV direct to hard disk (often in DivX), and then use something like PocketDivXEncoder to re-encode the video files overnight. Got a Media Center? Then Digital Media Converter v2.40 (www.deskshare.com) will convert Microsoft's own DVR-MS files into DivX.

While video transfer is reasonably easy to grasp now, the situation may change if Australia adopts a version of the Broadcast Flag DRM system being used in the US. The Broadcast Flag comes into effect on July 1, from which date all DTV devices must include DRM technology to detect a Broadcast Flag embedded in the programme signal. This Flag has the potential to lock down TV recordings to certain devices, restricting the portability of content. It's designed to stop TV shows being traded on file-sharing networks like Bittorent.

LINKS:

PocketDivXEncoder http://divx.ppccool.com
BetaPlayer http://betaplayer.c orecodec.org
ImTOO MPEG Encoder www.imtoo.com
PSP Video 9 www.pspvideo9.com