This is a quickie recipe i thought i should share that tells you how to sync your ext storage card (via a memory stick reader preferably) with Meida Player 10. This is great if your like me and have MCE 2005 and watch tv on your pc. Requirements: -Windows Media Player 10 -WM5 based device w/Ext Storage -Memory Card reader, Memory Card Overview: This receipe will tell you how to sync your tv/music/videos to a storage card (i use miniSD w/my Tmobile MDA) connected via a memory card reader. Quote: Main reason i use a memory card reader is because with Activesync and reading a storage card through activesync, it will cause your autoplaylists to sync whenever activesync does. And with version 4.1, activesync tries to trickle sync (every few minutes check status and if changes are seen, syncs) and thus in turn your pc is continously resyncing your playlists to your wm5 device. phew! lots there! first things first, open up Windows Media Player 10, got to your library and setup an autoplayl... Read More

 This is a recipe for all of those pocket pc owners out there. This recipe explains how to use virtualdub to encode divx or avi files for playback on a pocket pc device. Requirements: Pocket PC Device, Pocket MVP (music video player, formerly pocket divx), VirtualDub 1.4.9 or higher, Divx 5.0 Codec installed (http://www.divx.com, and a MP3 Codec installed (ie lame, nimocodec set) This recipe assumes the following: 1 You have an mpg or avi file of the movie/video you want to encode 2 You have Divx 5.0 or higher codec installed 3 You have virtualdub installed 4 You have an MP3 codec installed Step 1. Open VirtualDub and then open your movie file (avi, mpg or divx avi). First, go to Video under the menu and click Full Processing Mode. Step 2. Once you have your video file opened. We need to re-encode the video and audio with a lower bitrate and to make it playback smoothly on a PDA. First go to the Video Filters. We will want to resize and rotate our video so it plays in landscape mode on ... Read More

 This recipe is incomplete but will always be. Here are some good pocket pc tips for avid users of pdas!Seamonkey420's Pocket PC Tips: 1. If you have a memory card and use it a lot, be sure to defrag it once a month or more to help with performance. 2. Setup your hotkeys, especially if you use your pda as an mp3 player. Makes life much easier! 3. Get into the habit of putting your pda on the charger/sync when your at your desk so your pda is fully charged and sync when you do need to go. 4. Make backups of your pda regularly (just like any data, if its important, back it up!). Also, I owned an Compaq Ipaq 3630 and did the full backup. Then after i did that, i would let my battery run all the way out and then clear the RAM and then reload my backup. This also does a power cycle and can help with battery life (by draining completely and recharging full). This seems to help with performance issues. Just like any pc, the memory in the pda gets defragged too and doing a restore usually solve... Read More

 Windows Media Encoder can encode a video for watching on a Pocket PC in about 4 clicks. The resulting file is reasonably sized and the quality is very good.Download the Windows Media Encoder for Free at several sites, here is one found with Google : http://www.soft32.com/download_980.html. Install it and run it. It should start by opening up a Wizard dialogue. Click on the 'convert a file' option, then OK. It will then ask for a source and target file. Browse to the relevant files and click Next. Select 'Pocket PC' from the Content distribution list, and click Next. If you want to view the video in Portrait mode, click 'Next' at the 'Encoding Options' dialogue. I prefer to view them in Landscape mode, and you can select this from the 'Video' dropdown box. You can let the rest default and click 'Next'. You can fill in details of the clip if you like at the 'Display Information' dialogue, I don't normally bother. Click Next. There will be a 'Settings Review' screen, click Finish and the ... Read More