PocketPC Friendly Channel 9?

Hi All,

There have been times when I had my PocketPC (Dell Axim x51v) with me and a fast internet connection and I think to myself that it would be great to be able to watch a video on Channel 9, unfortunately the website doesn't play well with PocketIE and the videos are shown at a reduced bitrate (I think something like 24k).  All this makes for a very poor experience.  While I could live with the difficult front page I give up when trying to watch a video.  My PocketPC can easily handle the regular bitrate of the FullScreen videos but the video server cripples my video. 

Has anyone else been successful in watching a video from a Pocket PC and have the bitrate stay around 300k?

While I am at it I would like to put in a request for a PocketIE friendly site.

Seconded!

PDA != surfing device

Laptop = Surfing Device

To each his own!

I and others have been requesting this feautre a lot of times and it was voted for as the 2nd most important feature in a poll not too long ago. But so far I believe we have not yet heared any comments from the channel9 guys what their plans with this are. (/me waves at the c9guys)

MAYBE this will help in the meantime?

Try mobile.aol.com and try the search for Channel9 it should be the first link.

The reason I bring that up is because we just bought a company that is supposed to be able to take normal HTML and break it down to WAP and WML standard, so maybe it'll convert for you?

Just an idea....

Cybermagellan wrote:

MAYBE this will help in the meantime?

Try mobile.aol.com and try the search for Channel9 it should be the first link.

The reason I bring that up is because we just bought a company that is supposed to be able to take normal HTML and break it down to WAP and WML standard, so maybe it'll convert for you?

Just an idea....

Aha so you work for AOL.

The answer has always been why don't you use RSS to read C9 on your PDA?

But you can't post! This is the only issue with RSS. Now perhaps with SSE we will be able to do just that?

But it won't be all that soon, I don't think SSE is quite ready yet, so we'll have to wait.

DevilsRejection wrote:

PDA != surfing device

Laptop = Surfing Device

To each his own!

I surf on my phone all the time. The secret is not to use IE mobile because it cant render most pages, and many pages turn it away as an unsuported browser. Invest in Opera for Smartphone - its very good.

EDIT - havent tried it with windows mobile 5 so maybe things have changed.

Cybermagellan wrote:

The reason I bring that up is because we just bought a company that is supposed to be able to take normal HTML and break it down to WAP and WML standard, so maybe it'll convert for you?

That's a dirty hack, if web sites and mobile devices fully took advantage of XHTML then there wouldn't be any need for WML or "converters".

Tensor wrote:

havent tried it with windows mobile 5 so maybe things have changed.

They haven't. My iPAQ hx2490, which runs WM5 has no major improvements to pocket IE.

whats wrong with downloading the file and playing it back in WMP?

i usually copy the videos to my MMC card then play them back when i want.

hurcane wrote:

Tensor wrote: havent tried it with windows mobile 5 so maybe things have changed.

They haven't. My iPAQ hx2490, which runs WM5 has no major improvements to pocket IE.

PocketPC 2000's PIE is a variant of IE3.0 (it doesn't even support host headers, OMG!)

PocketPC 2002's (and Smartphone) PIE was a port of IE4.0 that supported handheld stylesheets.

I'm assuming that PocketPC 2003/2005's PIE was a port of IE5.0 or 5.5, right?

W3bbo wrote:

I'm assuming that PocketPC 2003/2005's PIE was a port of IE5.0 or 5.5, right?

As far as I could tell using the emulator images from the WM5 SDK, it's exactly the same as the IE in WM2003, based on IE4 (at least it still has the MSIE4 user agent string).

PPC doesn't do stuff like JavaScript, which limits it. And I believe it's IE only does HTML 3.2(?).

The tough part about detecting it for your own website is that Mac's also have PPC in it's browser name PocketPC/PowerPC

W3bbo wrote:

Cybermagellan wrote: The reason I bring that up is because we just bought a company that is supposed to be able to take normal HTML and break it down to WAP and WML standard, so maybe it'll convert for you?

That's a dirty hack, if web sites and mobile devices fully took advantage of XHTML then there wouldn't be any need for WML or "converters".

True, but they don't so it's a useless argument.

As I had mentioned before is regarding the streaming video.  While I do have an issue with the pages within the site, my biggest problem is with the video themselves.  A windows mobile 5 device has a Media Player 10 compatible media player so it qualfies for the "Plays for Sure" moniker but when plays for sure only plays at a crippled bitrate, I am not too impressed. 

From what I can gather the streaming server detects that I am running a protable device and scales the quality down.  The interesting thing is that I set an option in the Windows Media player to say that I am a 1 Mbps connection and I turned off the "Detect connection speed" but still the video comes to me at a reduced bit rate.

Cybermagellan wrote:

W3bbo wrote: Cybermagellan wrote: The reason I bring that up is because we just bought a company that is supposed to be able to take normal HTML and break it down to WAP and WML standard, so maybe it'll convert for you? That's a dirty hack, if web sites and mobile devices fully took advantage of XHTML then there wouldn't be any need for WML or "converters".

True, but they don't so it's a useless argument.

Modern ones do. WAP was developed for phones like the Nokia 7110 (back in 1999), times move on, but I guess it didn't make business sense to rewrite all their services for modern platforms.

Like how Adobe got rich with Acrobat, we're beginning to see hacks like "Mobile Controls" and the converter you talked about.

Are you sure you only want it to be PPC friendly... Surely you mean device friendly?  I.e. PPC, Smartphone, Symbian, Palm, Blackberry.... supported.... So that it is platform ubiquitous.

I know that's what I would want to do to it... But yes I agree it needs to support devices... I mean most of us are out and about travelling all over the place these days. 

It just makes sense to be able to get C9 anywhere on any device...  Come on Microsoft, you know you want to do it!!!