Winging It

Video on ye ol Blackjack II

Got a short trip coming up soon which will involve me and my youngest, Alex, hopping on a plane for a couple of hours. Being tech-ish, and wanting to pack light, I figured I'd get a couple of episodes of Spongebob from iTunes, and we'd have one entertained 5 year old via my Nano.

But, the Nano has one small screen. And, hey, look at that...the screen on my Blackjack is about TWICE as big! Light bulbs go off everywhere...

Went something like this...

Blackjack runs Windows, and has windows media player. I've got a ton of .avi movies, let's load one up!

[Failure]

OK, it's a stripped down version of media player, we'll just convert that sucker to a .wmv file and we'll be in business!! Google up a video converter and find Prism. Free, and does the trick. So, about 90 minutes later...30 minutes for the conversion, 60 minutes for Vista to kindly copy it to my Blackjack...we're pressing play on the Blackjack.

[Failure]

Mother puss bucket...in a moment of weakness, I email fellow BJII noob Harman. I figured his newly bestowed MVP status has given him great powers over all things Microsoft. It did, "Email Keith Elder, he's the mobile wizard."

I email The Elder, who promptly replies with, "Yikes, that's the one thing I've never tried on my phone!" Keith did direct me to another converter, Pocket DVD Wizard. This one is $25 with a free trial, which I snagged as it will give me 5 minutes of a movie converted to the format I need.

Fire up Pocket DVD Wizard, which asks what device I'll be using. Select Samsung, and the secret is revealed: The file type needs to be .3gp. With the conversion complete, I copy 5 minutes of Toy Story to the Blackjack, and...

[Success!!]

Short lived success, though, as it will only play in a tiny window. Flipping it to full screen makes it very pixelated and choppy. The window it plays in is smaller than that of the Nano, so back to square one.

Well, back to square 1.5. We're now converting a couple of those .avi files to .mp4 for the Nano. I figure the 4GB Nano will get us to and from Orlando, keep Alex occupied, and I'll use my Blackjack as an mp3 player for myself.

Assuming I can get that to work...

Oh, and Alex has no idea about the trip, it's a big surprise for him. Don't tell him!