Stream Video to PDA: Best Format & Server Options for Optimal Playback

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primal schemer
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Hi All,

I need to stream some video to a PDA (running windows CE). At the moment the video is in MPEG-4 format, and I could stream this using the darwin server, but I don't know of any player that is capable of playing a streaming MPEG-4 file. So, I don't mind changing the video format to a different one.

Basically I just want the PDA to be able to open a file on a server somewhere (this is video on demand right??)

I have used windows media player on it to stream .wmv files from a webpage, so maybe .wmv would be a good format to use? But what sort of streaming server should I use (even if it costs money).

Anyone any ideas??

PS
 
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Unsure about streaming servers, but Videolan might be a good choice...
As far as I know, VLC is available for the Pocket PC and I don't imagine it would be too hard getting x.264 and thus MPEG-4 files running on your Pocket PC...
But when you say streaming servers, I don't know if you're talking hardware-wise or software-wise? (Maybe I have no clue what I'm talking about, whatever)
But in the videos' current format, your best bet is to get x.264 running with VLC on your Pocket PC, along with the required audio (AAC?) codec.
 
Hi,

Yeah, I had looked at VLC, and I thought it was going to be a great solution. Unfortunately when I loaded it onto my PDA and tried to play a file, the audio played with no video. At first I though it might be because it was MPEG-4 video, but when I played an MPEG-1 video, or an AVI, the same thing happened (audio but no video).

At the moment looking to use windows media server, which means encoding all the video into .wmv :-(

PS
 
From the VLC site:

"The WinCE port of VLC is still experimental but you can get nightly builds for the Xscale platform. Use at your own risk ;)"

The issue with the Xscale platform is that it doesn't have a floating point unit so you either have to use software floating point or only use integer math. Thus taking already existing software can porting it to this platform can involve a lot of code rewrite.