Reader Q&A: Why No Full-Screen Video on VGA Pocket PCs?
June 16th, 2006 Jason Dunn
Reader Chas Williamson sent me a question via email that I thought was worth answering on the site. And it kicks off a new category of content on this site, answering reader email. Here’s what Chas is wondering about:
“I find it quite frustrating that, even with the iPaq 4705 running WM5 and other machines, I cannot get larger images in Windows Media Player. I have the Weather Channel on right now, and it has a 1 inch by 0.75 inch size (roughly). Try pressing “Full Screen”, and the only difference is that the same size image is turned on its side without anything else on the screen. It is certainly nothing like “Full Screen”. This problem happens in Smartvideo, VDC, Pocket Streamer de Luxe, direct download from a streaming web site. I would like to get a decent sized image taking up the whole (beautiful) screen. With the modern lovely machines costing a lot, and with all of the technology, why is something so simple made so hard?”
Chas’ frustration isn’t a new one - when the first VGA device hit the market in 2005, the Dell Axim X51v, one of the first things I tried with it was to watch a video clip. The video clip was 320 x 240 in size, and my expectation was that it would scale up to full screen - it didn’t. I did some investigating and the reason why Windows Media Player 10 Mobile doesn’t scale the video upwards is performance. There are 400% more pixels in VGA (307,200 pixels) than QVGA (76,800 pixels). The developer I spoke to said that the Pocket PC didn’t have enough CPU power to scale 320 x 240 video up 400% bigger - at least not without significant updates to Windows Media Player 10 Mobile. We’ve had VGA devices on the market now for almost a year, and unfortunately no update to WMP10 Mobile has been released. Thankfully, other developers have stepped up to the plate with solutions.
The best video player I’ve found for watching full-screen video on a VGA Pocket PC is The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPM for short). This is a free program that is amazingly capable. TCPMP supports a variety of video codecs, including DivX, XviD, MPEG4-SP (plus B-frame support), MPEG1, M-JPEG, and Windows Media Video (WMV). It also supports a variety of file containers, including AVI (*.avi), Matroska (*.mkv, *.mka), MP4 (*.mp4, *.m4a), Ogg Media (*.ogg, *.ogm), and ASF (*.asf). The short version? It plays just about anything. Here’s a screenshot of it:
The feature that makes it so great for VGA Pocket PCs is that it will scale 320 x 240 video up to fill the screen, which solves Chas’ problem. It’s amazingly light and fast, starting up instantly, and playing even the biggest video file immediately. It can be configured to start up full-screen, play video files faster or slower, and to associate with certain video files, meaning a single click on a video file will give you instant full-screen playback. And did I mention it’s free? Download it today!
Entry Filed under: Reader Q&A
10 Comments
1. Vincenzosi | June 16th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
My favorite feature is that it supports the Intel accelerator in my Axim X51v, meaning I get silky smooth framerates, excellent quality, and I don’t have to transcode any DivX files I end up with from the net.
Honestly, if it could play .flv files, it would be the ultimate program. Right now, it’s just 99.99999999% perfect.
2. JaapvanEkris | June 17th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
The problem that Windows Media player reduces its screensize to 240×320 can easily be resolved by modifying the registry. In \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Player\Video there are two keys: Maximum height (set to 240) and Maximum width (set to 320). Set them to 480 and 640 respectively and you can watch WMP full screen.
For people being hesitant for modifying the registry by hand: i have created a CAB-installer to do the same.
3. Jason Dunn | June 17th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Japp - that’s interesting, I’ve never investigated the registry hack method before. I tried downloading your CAB file but got an error.
4. alese | June 19th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
I have looked in registry of my HTC Universal, and there is no such registry entry…
5. JaapvanEkris | June 19th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Problem with the download fixed: sometimes you have to make sure everybody has got the correct rights (and not just the admin…). My apologies for the delay.
I have tested them on a Ipaq Hx4700 (WM2003SE), and the keys also did not exist there, but after adding them it still worked.
Jaap
6. alese | June 20th, 2006 at 8:45 am
I have tried the registry hack (entered the keys) on Universal - no effect - the video is still poststamp size.
7. JaapvanEkris | June 21st, 2006 at 1:41 pm
So it does not work on a WM5 device? But both run Windows Media Player 10 (WM2003SE runs 10.0, WM5 runs 10.2).
Is your movie 640×480, because it will not strech a picture to fit the screen, it will allways playback in real size.
8. Jason Dunn | June 21st, 2006 at 1:53 pm
“Is your movie 640×480, because it will not strech a picture to fit the screen, it will allways playback in real size.”
But then what does this registry change impact?
The original problem is that WMP 10 Mobile doesn’t scale video up to fill the screen, meaning it will not take a 320 x 240 video and stretch it to fit a 640 x 480 screen, like TCPMP does.
9. JaapvanEkris | June 21st, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Well, the problem is bigger than you might think. 640×480 movies are in fact always scaled DOWN, to make them fit a 320×240 screen (even when you have a VGA screen). The registry hack removes this restriction.
10. pheral | June 26th, 2006 at 3:24 am
ooh. i’ve seen tcpm all over the place, but never actually what the pros are. once i get time to get some movies on my player, i’ll certainly be downloading this so i can have fullscreen playback. i like the idea of answering reader emails, it’s certainly worked to my benefit this time!