Dave's Favorites: Movies on Your PDA With Kinoma

Watch a movie on your PDA? You're joking, right?

That's the reaction I get when I talk about copying home movies and TV shows to my Palm powered PDA. But as soon as I actually show folks what I'm talking about, I often make converts out of the uninitiated.

Last week I wrote about AcidImage 2.0, an image viewer that's optimized for the Sony Clie NR70. This week I've got more Clie software for you, Kinoma's Producer and Player. (The player is free, and the desktop Producer software costs $29.99.) Sure, Kinoma's software works with any Palm OS PDA, but since it can "collapse" the Clie's virtual Graffiti area and show a 320-by-480-pixel movie on the screen, this program is essential for Clie NR70 owners looking for programs that take advantage of their PDA's unique, hi-res display.

If you haven't already guessed, I'm utterly in love with my NR70, and I'm really jazzed about Kinoma because the company is single-handedly ushering in the future of handheld multimedia. With Kinoma Player, you can view a movie as large as many streaming videos that you watch on a desktop PC--right in the palm of your hand, free of stutters and jitters.

Making a movie with Kinoma Producer is a drag-and-drop affair. The program accepts video in a wide variety of formats, including QuickTime, MPEG, and AVI, and it lets you tweak the movie's specs, including frame rate and audio format.

I used Kinoma to copy a bunch of music videos from the Internet onto my Clie. Then I moved on to home movies transferred from my digital video camcorder, and I even put some complete episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons onto my Clie as well. The next time you travel by plane, bring along a Kinoma video. It's bound to be better than the in-flight movie.

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