Smartphone Media Studio 3.0 - Manual

 

 

This software allows you to put home movies, DVDs, downloaded content and TV on your Smartphone in two clicks.

What you need is:

- PC with Windows XP. For DVD support you'll also need a built-in DVD-player.

- 4 Gigabyte of free space on a harddisk (for a 100 minute movie) to store temporary files

- One of the following phones:

- Memorycard of at least 128 Mb for DVD support.

Installation

- Make sure you have Windows Media Player 9 or 10 installed on your system.

- Make sure your system has a software DVD player (such as PowerDVD or WinDVD), if you want to convert DVD content.

- Make sure you have a harddisk with at least 4 Gigabytes of free space. By default the software will look for the C:\ drive as the temporary drive. You can change this in DVD Settings Menu \ Temp Drive.

- Install the PC software by launching the red installer, it will auto-install the software and place shortcuts on the desktop and Windows Start Menu.

- Install the provided, free BetaPlayer on your Smartphone. Use Activesync to install it.

Quick Guide

[1] Source Drive . Click the drive you want to open. This can be a hard disk, CD-Rom, DVD-R(w), DVD-Video, removable drive, flash drive or anything else. Press Open to start. Choose DVD if the content is a DVD optical disc, or if it has already been stored on the harddrive. Choose Video Content if the content is a video file stored on the hard drive.

The content you picked will start playing in the Preview Window. You can right-click in the window for more preview options. Such as a fullscreen preview.

DVD's can contain multiple titles, such as (home) movies, trailers, etc. By default, the software will pick the largest title. Usually this is the main movie. You can change this in Advanced options.

DVD Copy Protection

  • Legislation in your country may prevent the transfer of copy-protected DVDs, even for personal use. Unprotected DVDs, such as most DVD containing TV-series, or DVD recordables/rewritables may still be converted.

If you have used (free) third-party tools to decrypt the DVD, such as 'DVD Shrink' or 'DVD Decrypter', you may open the DVD from the harddrive. Start Smartphone Media Studio, select DVD Content, press Open and browse to the disk drive that contains the movie. For example C:\DVD_Volume. Open that folder and the software will treat it as a normal DVD. Press Action to start converting.

If you have trouble converting a DVD directly with Smartphone Media Studio, we advice you to use DVD Decrypter to make a local hard drive copy first.

 


[2] Action / Advanced You can start immediately by pressing the Action button. The file or dvd conversion will begin right away. If you need control over the picture quality, language settings etcetera, you click the Advanced button.

Click on Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles . Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes two steps. DVD's are now captured using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your PC and the speed of your DVD drive. If you have a relatively fast PC and DVD drive, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further to the final Smartphone movie file. This will take approximately 2 times realtime on a 2Ghz PC. So 45 minutes for a 90 minute movie. On average, you may expect to transfer a DVD to your Smartphone in less then an hour.


[3] Source Size You need to tell the software what size the source content is, so that it can calculate the optimal playback size on your Smartphone.

Most DVD's have a 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen) and most TV shows have a 4:3 dimension. For feature films shot in Academy Standard 16:9, the widescreen-setting is automatically chosen. In case your DVD was shot in Cinemascope , you need to pick the Cinemascope (2.35:1 aspect ratio) setting. This will correct the 'egghead' effect that you may see. When finished press Next.

 

 

 

 


[5] Zoom Level . Choose the zoom level. Then press Next.

If you prefer to see the whole movie in widescreen, choose 'Show All'. This will give you the whole picture, but it will show black bars on the Smartphone. The reason is that film sizes (so called aspect ratio's) and the size of your Smartphone screen are different. You will notice that the shots are missing abit from the left and right side. If you choose 'Zoom In', the software will chop the black bars off and blow-up the picture.

 


[6] Encoding Quality. Choose the encoding quality. Then press Next.

If you prefer a better video quality, choose 'Better Picture'. This will give improved video quality, but you will hear lower quality sound. This is recommended for most (home) movies. 'Better Sound' will result in more blockiness in the video. However, the sound will be FM-radio like. It's recommended for music video's and home movies.

 

 


[7] Episodes, Language and Subtitles.

Next, you will see the episodes and language settings, the Episode , Audio Dub and Subtitle options appear.

A) Episode Menu. If your source material is a DVD, you have the option to select an alternative title from the disc. For example a 'behind the scenes'-documentary, or another episode from a DVD containing several tv-shows. The longest video on the disc will be shown by default, usually that's the main movie.

B) Audio Dub Menu. This allows you to set a foreign audiotrack. For example if you want to watch a movie in Spanish, you would pick that language and override the default English setting.

C) Subtitles Menu. If you choose subtitles, you will see a droplist of possible languages on the disc.


[8] Action. You press Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles . Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes two steps. DVD's are now captured using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your PC and the speed of your DVD drive. If you have a relatively fast PC and DVD drive, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further to the final Smartphone movie file. This will take approximately 3 times realtime on a 3Ghz PC. So 30 minutes for a 90 minute movie. On average, you may expect to transfer a DVD to your Smartphone in 45 minutes.


[9] Transfer

When conversion is finished, a 3gp-video file will be on your desktop. You can copy the file to your phone (make sure you have enough storage space on the memorycard). The video can go anywhere on the memorycard or phone memory, the player will automatically find it.

There are 2 ways to copy the video file from you desktop PC to the mobile phone:


[10] Play the video with the provided BetaPlayer.

On your Smartphone , press the Begin (Smartphone 2003) or Start (Smartphone 2002) button, then press the keypad (for example number 9, 9, 1, etc) or browse to choose theTCMP-Player.

[A] Once you launched the player , click on File , then 1. Open File , then choose Storage Card , and you will see your video n the left column. Scroll down to it and click on it

[B] Once selected, choose the File Menu, then 3. Play . The movie will start playing.

[C] To render fullscreen landscape playback, you choose the Options Menu, then 8. Fullscreen .

The volume can be adjusted with the (hardware) buttons on your phone, not in the software.


Menu Options

[1] DVD Settings \Temp Drive You set the disk drive that you would like to store temporary files on. Choose the biggest available harddrive that you have. Temporary files may take up to 4 Gigabytes space that need to be stored on this drive. They will be cleaned up after conversion.

[2] DVD Settings\Memorycard Set it to the size of your Memorycard. It is used to calculate the video- and audiobitrate so that the video will fit on your Memorycard.

[3] Download\Video This menu item allows you to download free video content from Youtube and Altavista

 

To watch content from Youtube on your smartphone: choose the menu Download \ Video \ from Youtube. You will be connected to a third-party download service (such as Videoronk). Here you can search for your favourite Youtube content and download it. The downloaded video will be in the FLV (Flash) format. The video may then be converted using Smartphone Media Studio.

 

If you encounter problems with the software, please consult the Tech Database : http://www.makayama.com/smartphone300engfaq.html for common questions and solutions.

updated: 26-november-2006