The appearance of the new Nokia 9500 Communicator, with
its up-to-date handling of standard H.263/MP4 video formats, has made me
reevaluate the video playback options in the older Nokia 9210i.
It's true that you can't play back in full-screen mode,
but then the screen's not really the right shape. And the plus side of using
just the smaller window in the middle of the screen is that the file sizes for
typical video clips are much smaller, typically only around 400K per minute of
footage. Putting that into perspective, you could fit three complete movies in
a single 128MB MMC.
Not that you'd want to, as the 9210i's Video player
doesn't have a 'fast forward' function, so everything has to be watched from
the beginning, rather limiting its use. Things it IS useful for include music
videos, children's programmes (for entertaining the kids in the back of the
car), and individual favourite movie trailers and clips.
Anyway, to the point of this short 'how to': getting DVD
chapters onto the 9210i. You'll need:
- Your trusty 9210i Communicator
- Nokia's original
Multimedia
Converter
- The trial version of Pocket-DVD Studio, either the Palm or Pocket
PC versions will do (if you need to do footage longer than about ten minutes,
note that you'll need to register this)
- Although there isn't yet a DVD-to-9210i type utility,
it's possible to use the aforementioned Pocket-DVD Studio to do the tricky DVD
'ripping' stage. Set the picture size up at 224 by 160 pixels, the quality to
'high' and use the slider along the bottom to select your start
point/chapter.
Pocket-DVD Studio will create a nice MPEG-4 encoded .AVI file
in your hard disk root folder. And it's quite quick too, ripping in more or
less real time.
- Start up Multimedia Converter and open this .AVI file.
Select Normal picture size and then click on 'Convert'.
Once done, click on
the 'Save' icon and Nokia's free utility then creates a .NIM video file in the
same folder.
- Rename the file as needed and use a card reader to copy
it into a suitable document/media folder on the card.
- Open it up in Video player (navigating to the .NIM file
in File manager is a good way, or perhaps use 'Add to Desk') and enjoy!
It's unlikely that you'll sit through 'Titanic' on your
9210i, but there's no reason why you can't keep a host of other shorter
features, music DVD tracks, kids segments, and so on, on your MMC for instant
use. |