Free Goodies for Your Pocket PC

It's not always true that the best things in life are free, but some of the best Pocket PC software is! Freeware has been around since before the first IBM PC was introduced in 1981. Individual programmers and users of a particular computer would create a simple program and pass it around for free to other users of that computer. Every computer operating system (Apple, DOS, Windows, Linux, etc.) has had freeware written for it, and the Pocket PC is no exception. (There's a pretty interesting history of freeware and shareware on the Public Software Library Web site:http://www.pslweb.com/cgi-bin/history.html).

I am working on the Pocket PCmagazine Best of Everything CD, which will be given free of cost to those people who subscribe or renew their subscription to Pocket PC magazine for two years. This CD includes games, utilities, e-books, video content, and themes. The CD also includes several hundred demos of the winners and finalists of our software awards. While researching software for this CD, I came across a lot of freebies for the Pocket PC. This article describes some of the best ones I found. In all cases I list the Web address of the developer so you don't have to wait for the CD to download the freeware.

Play DivX and MPEG video with Pocket DivX Player

This freebie lets you play DivX, OpenDivX, MPEG-4, and MPEG-1 videos and MP3 audio on your Pocket PC. You can create playlists of music and videos, assign hardware buttons to control player functions, rotate videos by 90 degrees to view in horizontal mode, and zoom the video image to twice the original size. The audio player has a 10-band equalizer with pre-amp. You can fast-forward audio and video files and stream audio and video content. You can adjust the cache size—a larger cache improves Pocket DivX performance, but causes it to consume more battery power. The interface of this application is not as user-friendly as some, but the functionality is great. This application is available for Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs. You can download it at the Project Mayo Web site (http://www.projectmayo.com).

Pocket DivX: This versatile audio and video player can play files in many different formats.

Play your MPEG-1 video files with Pocket TV

Pocket TV is the best MPEG video player available for the Pocket PC. It can play MPEG-1 video (video files with the .mpeg or .mpg file extension). You can play/pause a file, fast-forward it, and view it in full-screen mode. You can adjust the sound volume and configure the audio to play stereo, mono left channel, or mono right channel. The Pocket PC's hardware buttons can be mapped to control the various functions of the player. The software also allows streaming of MPEG-1 video from Web sites. Pocket TV displayed MPEG-1 video files much better than Pocket DivX. The difference was very noticeable when playing video files with higher bit rates and screen sizes. The "Classic" version of Pocket TV is available for free for all versions of the Pocket PC, as well as the Casio BE-300, the older Palm-sized PC (Windows CE 2.11), and the older Handheld PCs (Windows CE 2.0). The Pocket TV "Enterprise Edition," priced at $49.95, is available for the Handheld PC Pro and H/PC 2000 (Windows CE 2.11 and above). Pocket TV can be downloaded at the MpegTV Web site (http://www.mpegtv.com/wince/pockettv/index.html). After you download and install the program, you have to register the program with the Web site and get a free unlock code in order to use it.

Pocket TV is the best Pocket PC Mpeg video player available.

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