Is an iPod or Zune Not in Your Budget? Build Your Own!

If you really like Apple's iPod Touch or Microsoft's Zune 2, but neither fits into your budget, then consider building your own mobile media player with a used PDA and little or no money. It's much simpler than you may think.

Finding a player
The Core Pocket Media Player, TCPMP, for short, is a program for Windows PocketPC, Windows Mobile and PalmOS that allows you play music and video files. With this free program on your PDA, it will play videos just like an iPod or Zune. And on PDAs with the right type of screen, it will even switch to wide screen mode, which is a feature that iPod did not have until the iPhone and the iPod Touch debuted.

One of the advantages of TCPMP over an iPod is that supports multiple video formats like DivX and Windows Media Video. Although the free version of TCPMP is no longer under development as open source software, it can still be downloaded. The developers have taken the software commercial under the name CorePlayer and added support for more media types and added support for mobile devices like Symbian OS.

Encoding Video
These applications should install into your PDA through Microsoft's ActiveSync like any other program. After the player is installed, you need to feed it some content. TCPMP or CorePlayer will play audio files like MP3, but most people are interested in video. If you have enough storage, you could drag almost any video file to your PDA and they would play, but that would be a waste of battery power and flash drive space.

Encoding, or shrinking, the video to fit your screen will save you from recharging as often and allow you to squeeze more video on your PDA at one time. PocketDivXEncoder is a great utility for Windows that has preset video options to shrink video to fit your PDA and it can encode from several video formats. With this utility, you can squeeze a typical hour-long episode of your favorite show into about a 100 MB without noticing any degradation of the video on your PDA. Usually, a video quality setting of 12 will be fine for most PDAs.

If you want to copy video directly from your DVD collection, then Handbrake is a great option. A Windows version was recently released and supports direct encoding from DVD. If you use the Windows version of HandBrake, then you will need to change the output video encoder from the default MP4 to Xvid and change the output audio encoder from AAC, an Apple audio format, to the more common MP3 audio format. CorePlayer and TCPMP both support Xvid and MP3 formats, so the video should be ready to copy over to the PDA. In some cases, it is simplest to rip DVDs using HandBrake in Xvid format and then shrink them to PDA size with PocketDivXEncoder, but that increases the video prep time. Fortunately, both encoding programs supporting queueing, which allows you set the computer to encode multiple files sequentially.

Storage
After you get the hang of encoding video, you will find that whatever amount of storage that came built in to your mobile device is not enough. Thankfully, most PDAs support Compact Flash or Secure Digital cards like the ones that cameras use, so upgrading your storage should be inexpensive.

Admittedly, the interface on your homemade mobile media player will not be as slick as an iPod or Zune, but the actual video will not look much different. With these tools, you can take your entertainment center with you wherever you go and satiate your iPod envy on a shoestring budget.