SmartMovie 2.71

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SmartMovie 2.71

Aalaap Ghag, Feb 20, 2005 0000 hrs IST

All the movie madness on the 7710 was thanks to a third-party application called SmartMovie

Very easy to use, Fast conversion, Ability to split and join clips

Doesn't support certain files, Not able to load all subtitles, Not free

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

Getting the best result is very easy with the crop mode. You can have the movie in the exact full-frame mode, which means black bands at least on the side if not the top, since the wide-screen aspect of the 7710 is 2:1 ratio, not 1.85:1 or 1.33:1 or 2:35, which are standard movie screen ratios. The best way to get the best result is the Full crop mode, where all the black bands are removed and the entire screen is used up for the movie. Due to the ratio difference, a little bit of the sides will get cut, but it's not a problem for most movies. It shows you your device on the screen, so you can instantly see how it'll look like when you convert it.

You can also load subtitles in SUB, SRT and TXT format. However, we couldn't successfully get it to load all SUBs.

In the video settings box, it lets you decide the quality of the encoded video. We tried all bitrates from 512 down till 112, but they all jerked and gave an average output of 2 or 3 FPS, which was obviously unacceptable. That's what the "Reduce Frames" option is for. It performs a pulldown while encoding, so the device is able to handle the frame rate. After reducing frames, the movie worked fine.

The default audio settings of 24 Kbps/16 KHz work well for a mobile device, but if you need more quality you can adjust it here. By default the audio is encoded in mono, but you can untick the box to make it stereo. Volume boost comes in handy when you have those movies with really low source level audio. Or if it's too noisy, you can also have an audio-less file.

Conversion is also surprisingly fast - it took us only 20 minutes to encode a movie a little over one and half an hour.

The second component of SmartMovie is the actual player, which has to be installed separately on your device. After installing the player, you also have to install the XviD codec, which is also conveniently bundled with the download, on the device. This process takes under one minute.

After converting the file, you can send it to the phone (via Bluetooth or IR or USB) and play it back through the player.

SmartMovie is not free. The Symbian version costs $26.99 (Rs.1,182), Palm OS and SmartPhone (Windows Mobile) versions are $19.99 (Rs. 875), and the Pocket PC version is $24.99 (Rs. 1080). It's not too expensive, and we definitely think it's worth the price for any movie enthusiast who'd like to take his movies with him wherever he goes.