PocketMatrix

hey all,<br><br>i'm thinking of buying a 1 gb microdrive so i can watch movies on my ipaq using the howto in this site. Has anyone else done this? do the movies look clear and fluid (no jerkiness). I don't have a MPEG decoder card in my pc, so will this affect the speed or quality of the encoding? also, I have a habit of losing my expensive gadgets, so I buy insurance for everything. Does anyone know of any way i can insure the microdrive?<br><br>thanks<br><br>warp10

I have a microdrive for my E-125 and never take it out of the CF Slot. It has 3 full length movies on it, not to mention the full version of Quake plus 12+ other full games for the PPC. I also have all of my 25+ eBooks on it. <br>Depending on how you encode it, no it's not jerky. Sometimes it will jerk if there's a lot of movement on the screen or if the sound is become taxing for the device. But Gone in 60 Seconds plays almost flawlessly on my E-125, it would be even better on an iPaq. Each movie takes up about 300 MB on my MicroDrive, but I encode in extremely high quality (I'm a stickler for quality). <br>I have not heard much about insurance for a MicroDrive. Warranties are available, of course, but You'll have to ask MicroTech or IBM (or the store you buy it from) about any kind of insurance.

Just received my microdrive this past week.  It works great playing movies from filmspeed.com. I'm in the process of encoding DVDs now, can't wait!<br><br>

yeah Microdrive insurance would be nice, I already argued with pdaslostorstolen.com about it and they said they wouldn't cover it because they had no way of telling if you physically own the device.. what a load of bs

What settings do you use that make your movies a higher quality than what's recommended in the 'How To'?

The highest quality settings in the how-to will yeild you a very nice movie. For most movies anything more would be a waste of space. If you are encoding a movie with alot of "action" meaning that the screen is always changing very rapidly, then it can get pixaly. So in that case you could use a higher quality setting. But keep in mind that the 50 mark on the quality slider is default.

LOL, matt you set it at 50? Mine is always at 100 quality! And it runs just as fast, albiet it is a littler bigger. My average movie is 300 MB.

moose you are really just wasting space, I encoded the same movie twice, once at 100 quality and the second time at 65. There was no difference in quality between the two movies. The only difference was I saved myself a hefty chunk of storage.

Alright, I'll look into it, next time I have 12 free hours.