With the cropping modes, you can set the encoding to make the most of the image on your handheld. There are a couple of crops that will work best depending on whether you have a square or rectangular display. It can be set for the maximum available image, to incorporate subtitles, or to display a full letterbox-type image.

Speaking of subtitles, the Subtitle drop-down will let you choose from whatever subtitle language tracks are encoded on the DVD. I had to play around with this on a couple of movies as sometimes films will have subtitles in them, but they won't always be displayed with the default subtitle setting, which is None. Then again, sometimes they are.

The Audio setting is something I have found can generally be left alone, as Pocket DVD Studio chooses the best setting. It also gives the audio track a bit of a boost, which can be adjusted under Settings, to make it a little louder on handheld devices.

Now that all your choices are made, all that's left is to click Start. The movie will begin encoding, saving to whatever directory you chose in the Settings. Pocket DVD encodes the movie on the fly, as the track is read, so it will take about as long as the movie does to play. The good thing about this is, you can stop at any time and have a playable AVI file of the movie up to that point. This is great for checking how the movie plays on your handheld before encoding the whole thing.

Across the bottom of the Preview slider is the Status display where you'll find the percentage completed, amount of movie time encoded so far, how long the program has been encoding, how much time is left, the file size encoded so far, and the estimated total file size. As I said, every file I've encoded to far has come out considerably smaller than the estimate.

I feel I must include a disclaimer here. Legally, you can only encode movies that you own, not rent, and only for your own personal use, not for distribution. Even at that, some countries still have restrictions on doing even this. It's best to know the laws where you live. Of course, if they're DVDs of your own creation, such as home movies or independent films that you've made, then it's all good.

Playing it
Now that your movie has been encoded for play on the handheld, you'll need something to play it with. This is where MMPlayer comes in. MMPlayer is a Palm OS-based media player for playing MP3s, AVIs, and MPEGs in their native format.

In other words, they don't need to be encoded to a PDB file in order to be used. You merely load the file onto your memory card; select it in the Playlist screen, and tap Play.

The native file support is what really attracted me to MMPlayer. As far as I know, MMPlayer is the only Palm media player that supports native media file formats. I've used other Palm media players that require extra encoding, and I think MMPlayer has them all beat.

It's possible, and even probable, that video files encoded for play on a PC will have a bit-rate too high for the handheld. In this instance, there are freeware programs available, such as VirtualDub, which will allow you to lower the bit-rate to a more acceptable level. The MMPlayer manual even contains instructions on how to use VirtualDub to re-encode a video to optimal play if necessary.