Divx on n97 – nothing works? problem solved

August 18, 2009 at 9:58 PM · Filed under gadgets, tech talk

I love my new nokia n97… It’s a truly amazing and versatile phone that suits me perfectly. One thing i kind of missed was divx support, which i thought would come in the form of divx mobile, which can be downloaded for free from http://www.divx.com/mobile/ but don’t bother. You will download, install and realise that none of the buttons work and it’s pretty crap. If you do manage to get something to play it will be all jerky and no fun to watch.

Unfortunately, even if smartmovie and divx mobile and all of those work on your phone, you still have to convert you divx movies to mobile format for them to play smoothly. Divx mobile by default is pretty low resolution, and i wouldn’t bother with it if I were you.

So, where does that leave you? No 3rd party software works perfectly because your phone is simply too new. I tackled the problem a different way. I know the phone plays .3gp .3g2 .mp4 etc and i know that the realplayer installed on the phone is very quick and easy to use.

Then i remembered a little program i used to use with my ipod called plato video converter (Download it here). Yeah i know, you still have to convert but this does it nice and quickly, relatively speaking. It’s intuitive and nice to use and of course 100% free… Just queue up the files you want to convert and set your computer working. The program makes great use of all 4 cores on my computer and movies convert in about 15 mins, which is not bad if you’ve every experienced slow video conversion. You can even set the pc to turn off once finished, which makes the process even less painful.

you can see from the image what settings i use. Feel free to play around with them but these work for me.

hook the phone up by USB cable and use the mass storage function (easiest/quickest) and dump your new converted movie into your movies or videos folder. You don’t need to worry about about it anymore after that, realplayer will find it pretty much anywhere you dump it.

Conclusion:
I know you still need to convert, but at least you can play files from your file manager or from your videos folder through a supported and easy to use player.

The n97 is made for video, so don’t hold out for new video players when you have a great one already.

I hope this helps some people who want to make the most of their new hardware.

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doc2pdf.net – a great resource

July 24, 2009 at 12:19 PM · Filed under tech talk

I have been working on a very official EU project with multiple countries involved over the past few years. I would just like to acknowledge the amount of time and money i saved because of this website.

It advertises that it converts .doc to .pdf but much to my delight it has had no problems with .xls or .ppt files either. I chose pdf because it’s easy to work with from a read-only point of view (displaying to end user). I felt it was important to relay the official documents rather than transcribe them into web format. At present the site is still under wraps, so i can’t show how i have used www.doc2pdf.net but i can assure you i have used it hundreds of times.

Please support it

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