Google Video has a new button that lets you download its videos for "iPods and Sony PS game computers." Well, only slightly misleading.
The downloadable videos are in MP4 format, at 320x240 resolution. Ugly for today's 21" widescreen monitors employed by desktop computers, but just right for handheld devices -- like my Palm TX.
Here's what you need to watch full-length movies on a Palm:
1. Get a high capacity SD memory card for storing the movies on the Palm. I use the cheapest 2GB card from SanDisk, which are as little as $30 now.
2. Get a copy of Core media player software. It's around $20-$30 (sometimes on sale), and is needed because it has the codecs for playing back MP4 (MPEG-4) videos. Install on your Palm. (The free version, TCPMP, doesn't support MP4.)
3. Go to Google Video, and download the movies you want. I find that Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies tend to be about 1.25 hours long, which generates an MP4 file that's about 250-300MB. That means we can fit about eight hours of movies on an 2GB SD card.
4. I use a card reader to copy the MP4 files from my computer to the SD card. (I created a folder called VIDEO on the SD card.)
5. Start the Core player, select the movie file, and enjoy full-screen viewing on the Palm's 4" screen!
What's great about this new Google Video feature is no conversion! You just download and copy over. Unlike, say, my Samsung digital camera that also plays back videos -- the catch being that I have to use dreadful software provided by Samsung that takes forever to convert the movie to Samsung's proprietary format.
The only pain is that sometimes the download is unpredictable. When I downloaded five episodes of MST3, only two downloaded smoothly; the other three kept stalling.
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