Do you want to view free movies? Free as in freedom? Want to download movies without membership fees? Here you may find some links to free movies and videos, which you may play on your Linux PDA, Linux TabletPC, Linux laptop or portable media player. Many of them are published under a free license, e.g. Creative Commons, GPL. Not much yet but I hope it works as a start. There are also links to tips, tricks and HOWTOs for format conversions (MPEG, DivX and others) with Linux, to get your favorite movie running on a PDA. If you know of something missing here please let me know.
There are several tools, e.g. mencoder(http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/), ffmpeg(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16082) , transcode(http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/). See also zmencoder(http://63.194.216.219/zmencoder.sh.txt) and this text(http://www.zeb.uklinux.net/encoding.html), which provides some examples for PDA encodings.
This
page(http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/)
offers a step by step 'how to' detailing converting existing movie files to the image format supported by the
Sharp
Zaurus SL-C760 movie player. The Zaurus movie player only plays files with a .wmv or .asf extension, and these
files must have the video encoded as MPEG 4 and the audio as MP3.
And here are some more tips for
good video performance(http://www.atari-source.org/?q=node/57)
on Spitz/Akita with OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 and OPIE.
Here is a HOWTO, to convert videos for Palm mmplayer under Linux(http://www.handhirn.de/linux/mencoder.php) (in German).
This document(http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hensley/zaurus/encode.html) is designed to help people who own a DVD, re-encode it so that they can watch it on their Linux PDA.
Encoding and Playing Video for C7x0 Devices(http://openzaurus.org/wordpress/howto/encoding-and-playing-video-for-c7x0-devices/).
Clié movies - Image Converter vs. PEGA-VR100K(http://www.ottaky.com/vr100k.php).
Newer camera mobiles can take movies from their integrated camera which are encoded in 3GPP (usually with suffix .3gp). This tutorial(http://www.niemueller.de/wiki/index.php?ConvertVideoTo3GP) explains how to convert your video to 3GPP.
The format 3GPP is a flavor of QuickTime. Using ffmpeg it's possible to
encode directly to 3GPP using free software(http://excamera.com/articles/24/movie.html).