[mythtv-users] Mobile Video Player Recommendations (MPEG4)

Bob Cottingham bobnvic at gmail.com
Fri Jan 26 15:50:13 UTC 2007


On 1/25/07, Kevin Hulse <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
> Hullo,
>
>    I am interested in something like the video ipod. However,
> I am not interested in re-transcoding everything to be
> compatable with the video ipod. Are there any units like from
> iriver or archos that are more mythtv friendly. What exactly
> is the variant of MPEG4 being used by mythtv (since it's not
> H.264) and are there any portable video players that support
> it?
>
>     I would like to just "dock" the video player and have
> it sync overnight with minimal muss and fuss, preferably
> being able to completely refresh the 20G or so worth of
> content that could fit on it. So a simple dump/file copy
> onto the device would be ideal.

It isn't what you said you were looking for, but I thought I'd throw
my solution out. I have a PPC 6700 Phone/PDA from Sprint which costs
about $299 and has a 320x240 screen and both EVDO and WiFi for
internet access. While I could put videos on a mini-SD card and watch
them, I actually watch them streamed from my server at home. I use vlc
to transcode on the fly and stream the video over my 350kbps uplink
and it works great. I can access all of my videos through a webpage I
wrote and tv recordings through mythstreamtv.  The server is a dinky
1.8GHz Duron system that doesn't have any problem transcoding the
files on the fly.  I think the picture actually looks pretty good and
is quite watchable, although occasionally I see short buffering
pauses.

If you didn't want to stream the video you could still transcode the
video and put it on a 2GB mini-SD card (about $30) to watch it.

For the cost difference between this phone and a standard PDA, having
the internet access ($15/month with Sprint) or using WiFi is very
useful. Of course, other phone PDAs should work as well, although the
Treo's square screen doesn't make it very suitable to watching video.
Sprint also has the MOTO Q for $199.99 with a 320x240 screen that
looks like it may work well too, although I think I'm spoiled on the
touch screen and the MOTO Q doesn't have one.  Verizon has some of the
same phones and may be an option as well, though I can't speak to
them.

Bob Cottingham


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list