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To: Greysard
I have 8 movies on my Dell Streak now.

The Princess Bride
Returner
Shall We Dance (Japanese original)
Shall We Dance (American remake)
Take The Lead
Strictly Ballroom
For A Few Dollars More
Because Of You

Good to have when I'm waiting at a job site.

20 posted on 02/09/2011 7:44:25 AM PST by MrEdd (Heck? Geewhiz Cripes, thats the place where people who don't believe in Gosh think they aint going.8)
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To: MrEdd
I have 8 movies on my Dell Streak now.

It is certainly possible to have movies on a tablet or a smartphone, as long as there is enough disk space. It is also possible to play them because video chipsets today come with hardware decoders just for such a thing. That's why an iPod can play music seemingly forever, and even a DVD playback is done largely by specialized, optimized hardware. The processor in the smartphone does little - it only needs to read the encoded data from the media and shove it into the decoder.

However encoding audio or video requires a lot of processor effort. Encoding of a video is a lengthy process even on a fast desktop PC. As an analogy, it's easy to open a lock if you have a key. But it is much harder to select one lock out of billions that can be opened by a given key. The encoding process is similar to that - it aims to find such a compressed frame that conveys the original content with minimal distortions (artifacts.)

My point was that a smartphone is not even close to a desktop PC in every comparable aspect, primarily in performance. This is because a desktop PC can throw watts at the problem, and a portable unit can't. I'm not even wading into the dearth of quality pointing devices for smartphones... smartphones nowadays want you to control them with your fingers. But an average finger is covering so much of that tiny screen that you can't fit more than a handful of controls onto it. Smartphone is good for smartphoning, but it is ridiculous to compare it to a desktop PC or to infer anything from the results of said comparison.

31 posted on 02/09/2011 9:14:25 PM PST by Greysard
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