HTC TYTN II ... SUITABLE MEDIA DEVICE?

Finally... Podcasting could come to a new medium, phones (outside the iphones) especially to that of my own beast...

Observe the following..


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The phone is touch screen, but I wanted to avoid doing that so I could capture the whole screen in action...

Up first was sarah doing nerdtainment. Then we had zadi doing a certain webcast new media show who'se name escapes me, epicsummatorother :p ;)

A few things to take heed. First of all. This is a windows mobile/smartphone/pocketpc/do-hickey. Namely the tytn II that I bought, outright and unlocked, almost exactly a year ago. Now it has only been recently that I tried to run different kinds of videos since I started to get into new media and podcasts. None of it being overly satisfactory, playback of the main wmv & mp4 formats being overly sluggish, stuttery and the sound is always lagging.

Googling some of these issues. I came across this site What this boils down to is that HTC manufactured the TYTN II With an ATI Imageon graphics chip. A sort of pda graphics acccelerator if you will. However they did not include drivers for the ati chip. It's just redundant. And that's what that site's all about. To get htc to shift their arse and give us graphic driver software to turn this phone into the true multimedia powerhouse it can be!!

Anyways that brings me onto the following... through htcclassaction I got wind of something called coreplayer. I did pay outright for this (praise be the strong - for the moment - £sterling :P ). As it also comes with support for flv files. That's great as thanks to the latest realplayer I now have heaps of them.

Going by the vid I posted. Sarah was on a .flv I got courtesy of youtube. Epicfu was on the mp4 format used for both psp and ipod/tunes. Since the phone only has 128MB's of memory the storage comes courtesy of an 8Gb microsd transflash card. however WMV's are still as bad as they were.
But that's ok since I can plunder as much flv's as I want and watch them to my heart's content...

Or can I?

The thing is... There are certain flv's that can be played on coreplayer and the rest can't. Some of the files, on accessing them, states something about "ON2 VP6 codec not supported". Then the file plays only the sound and I don't get any video. These tended to happen to FLV's I got here from mix, vimeo, collegehumor. And the "reformat the planet" documentary that was recently on pitchfork, to name but a few examples. Come to think of it, this applies to all flv's that I obtained outside of youtube. That certainly seems to be the case after looking at the media properties in core player itself. Incidentaly, on youtube flv's the codec used is "H.263 FLV"

Now this leads me to a question which maybe the mix crew might be best placed to answer since they deal with a lot of videoediting and formats.

Is there any way to convert "on2 VP6" codec ".FLV's" into "H.263 FLV" ones or even MP4s. Or both?

Also. What is a good video converter for reducing video size/resolution and converting to MP4? I could use this to see if I can get full size movies to work on my phone :-)

I realise I could rescan youtube and download the flv's in the appropriate format. But the tube Ain't gonna have all of "reformat the planet" for me to show & watch on my travels :( .