Are you tired of viewing photos or videos on the tiny screen of your digital camera? It's great to be able to immediately review your photos or videos, but doing so on these incredibly small screens doesn't let you see the detail you need to evaluate the image or video. Of course you can connect your digital camera to a TV or computer monitor, but you have to carry around a connectivity cable to do that. In addition, you have to find a free monitor and figure out how to connect it to the camera.
Size does matter!
If you're reading this magazine, you already carry a larger, more viewable screen with you all the time—the one on your Pocket or Handheld PC. All Pocket PCs have a 240x320 pixel screen with diagonal measurements of about four inches. This gives you over four times the viewable area of most digital camera screens. Current Handheld PCs have screens at least twice the size of a Pocket PCs, and most Pocket and Handheld PC screens display 65,000 colors. It's true that these screens are not as big as a TV monitor, but they are far better than the tiny 256-color displays found on most digital cameras.
Digital recorders and video file formats
There are two types of portable digital video recording devices: camcorders and video-capable digital cameras. Camcorders save their movies in Digital Video (DV) format on videocassettes and, more recently, on solid-state memory cards. Camcorder movies can be very large, multi-gigabyte files; making this format unsuitable for devices with limited memory, like the Pocket or Handheld PC. There are no DV video player programs for Windows Powered devices, so you cannot preview DV videos on a Pocket or Handheld PC without first translating it to a more suitable format.
Many of today's digital cameras have a movie mode, some with audio capability, that lets you save shorter videos in more compressed formats. Still images and movies are saved on CompactFlash or SmartMedia cards (see "Digital Camera Video and Memory Chart" on the next page). It's easy to pop the card out of the camera, slip it into the Pocket or Handheld PC, and transfer digital images and videos to your Windows Powered device. Note that Pretec(www.pretec.com)offers the $41 CompactSSFDC, an adapter that lets you insert a SmartMedia card (up to 32MB at the present time) in a Pocket or Handheld PC's (Type II) CompactFlash slot.
It's relatively easy to transfer digital camera movie files to a Pocket or Handheld PC, but playing them is another matter. All Pocket PC 2002s come with a video-capable version of Windows Media Player built in. However, this application only plays videos in the Windows Media format, which is not used by digital cameras. There are a number of add-on video players for Pocket and Handheld PCs, including the following:
But all of these play MPEG videos, a format used in only a few Sony video-capable digital cameras. Most digital cameras use AVI and MOV video formats, and until recently you needed to use a desktop PC translation utility to convert the file into Media Player or MPEG format before you could view it on your Pocket or Handheld PC.
PQView: View photos, videos, and more
Fortunately, the previewing of digital camera videos has become a lot easier with the release of PQView from BitBank Software(www.bitbanksoftware.com). PQView (Pocket QuickView) is a fast, full-featured image viewer, available for all Pocket PCs, the Handheld PC Pro and the H/PC 2000. It supports a variety of still-image formats, animated GIF and FLI/FLC, and the "motion-AVI" and "motion-MOV" formats used by many digital cameras. Motion AVI and MOV formats are different from standard AVI and MOV formats. You cannot use PQView to display many of the AVIs or MOVs you find on the Internet just the "motion" AVIs and MOVs captured by digital cameras.
Copy the videos to the My Documents folder of your Pocket or Handheld PC. Then open PQView and they will appear in the Thumbnail or Combo Views (Screens 1, 2, and 3), along with the other images in My Documents. In the Combo View tap on a thumbnail and it is displayed in a larger view. You can also access video or image files from the Open File folder icon at the bottom of the screen.
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