Dave's Favorites: Pocket DVD Studio Plays Your Movies on a PDA

In recent years, my trusty little PDA has become a practical way to show off my favorite digital pictures. I've sworn off wallet photos entirely, in fact. When someone says something foolish, like "Do you have any pictures of your kids?" I simply pull my Palm Tungsten T3 out of my pocket and offer them a veritable slide show of recent photos.

But what about video? Can we show home movies on our PDAs, too?

You bet. Modern Palm and Pocket PC devices are certainly speedy enough for video. But it's not always easy to get movies onto the PDA to begin with. That's why I like Pocket-DVD Studio, which comes in both Palm OS and Pocket PC versions. This $32 application can take DVDs--both commercial movies and videos you've burned onto DVD yourself--and transform them into files optimized for your favorite PDA. You can choose screen sizes from 160 by 160 for really old devices all the way up to 480 by 320 for the latest generation. And though you can fit a 3-hour movie on a 512MB Secure Digital card, the audio and video quality are quite adequate.

I've used Pocket-DVD Studio to make Palm-sized copies of personal videos to show off to friends when I travel, and I've also used it to transfer commercial DVDs to my Palm for lengthy plane flights. The Seattle-to-Chicago hop is far more fun when you have a few episodes of Fox's short-lived series The Tick on your PDA.

Download a free trial from PQDVD.com.