Video on the Series 5mx!

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Download sample movie clips tweaked for the 5mx here

• Love don't lead (video clip of me playing guitar in pub with my brother!)
• Trailer for the movie ‘Scream’

I know the 5mx an old machine now, but it has hidden capabilities. Want to play Quicktime movie clips on your Series 5mx? Here's how.

*This information is brought to you in conjunction with PDA Essentials magazine in the UK.

1. Install the Java Runtime Engine onto your Psion Series 5mx from the CD

2. Get hold of some Quicktime or AVI files. You will need to compress these so that they will play on your Psion. I use Quicktime Pro on the Mac to do this, but there should be other programs available on the PC. I have found that the best settings to use are:

   • Cinepak compression, Millions of Colors
   • 5 frames per second, limit data rate to 7kBytes per sec
   • Set quality to Medium or High
   • Set sound compression to uLaw 2:1 at 8 kHz

   You should get about 1 minute of video per megabyte at 156x112 pixels

   If you have less that 8MB free RAM on your Psion's C: drive, you should copy the video clips to your D: drive

3. Download the Java Media Framework from here
4. Either copy this zip file to your Psion and unzip on using your favourite EPOC Zip program, or unzip on your PC and copy the contents of the zip file onto your Psion
5. The zip file contains html, lib, and samples folders. From the lib folder, move the files jmf.jar and jmfbean.jar to ?:\System\Java\ext where ? is the Psion drive (C: or D:) on which you installed the Java Runtime Engine
6. From the samples folder, open the Player folder. Double-tap on the SimplePlayer.class file
7. If all goes well, you should see the Java Media Player start up. Press the Menu button on your Psion and select Open File, and choose your video clip. You will need at least 3MB of free RAM to run this, plus free RAM equal to the size of your video clip, if you are playing the clip from your C: drive. If you are playing from D:, you can get away with less. I have found that with 5 MB free RAM on C: I can successfully play 2.5MB video clips from the D: drive.
8. Hopefully after about 30 seconds your video clip should start playing. For the Psions 16-grey screen, the quality is not too bad, if only for the novelty value!

Let me know how you get on. Also, I would be interested to hear how well this works on a netBook/Series 7

Phil

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