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Encoding and Streaming to your Pocket PC (4)
By admin | April 24, 2007
What About The Almost Limitless Supply?
OK, so you may be thinking to yourself “well, yes, but I’ve still got to copy files onto my Pocket PC and I haven’t got a limitless amount of storage, so what can be done about that?”
What we’ve looked at so far is how to encode, or convert material that is on your PC into a format that the Pocket PC can handle. We are now going to take what we’ve learned and take it to the next step - sending it across a wireless network … or streaming it, to say otherwise.
The significant point, though, about streaming from Windows Media Encoder on your PC to the Pocket PC is that you can then use the “capture from device” to your advantage. For example, if you set up Windows Media Player on your PC to play a list of tracks that lasts a couple of hours, you can stream from the sound card device to your Pocket PC without having to spend ages downloading the files to the Pocket PC first.
If you’ve got a TV tuner card in your PC, you can even stream television to your Pocket PC.
So What Is Streaming?
Streaming, at its most literal, is the continuous supply of data. If you’ve ever watched a movie trailer on the Internet, it is likely that it has been streamed to your PC or Pocket PC. Streaming avoids the need to download the whole file before you can start playing it. That becomes particularly important if you want to watch or listen to a live broadcast … it becomes a bit difficult trying to download that.
The actual process
Start by running the encoder application. If you are using Encoder 7.1, leave the first option selected and click on OK then pick “Broadcast a live event from attached devices or computer screen” and click Next. If you are using Encoder 9, select the “Broadcast a live event” wizard and click on OK.
Both encoders will then display a window that allows you to specify the devices you want to use as your source material. If you want to just stream a single file, it can be done, but you need to set up a custom session in order to achieve that. I’ll cover that near the end of the article.
Figure 7: Specifying the devices to be used for the source material
You have to stream at least audio - the video part is optional. So the first step is to turn off the video option if you only want to stream audio. Let’s do that for now - we can come back and do video later.
Make sure that your sound card is selected as the device and click on the Configure button. The window that appears will allow you to select the recording input on your sound device. If you want to stream what Windows Media Player is playing, your sound device must offer something like “What U Hear” or “mixer” - in other words, the output of the sound card. Select that from the “Pin Line” drop down menu, select the checkbox next to Enable and click on OK.
…to be continued…
Source: pocketpcthoughts.com
Topics: Computers & Software |