Hi All,

I am an absolute Newbie in video capturing, but I believe I have
done my homework:

Here is the problem:

Recently I read a couple of interesting articles on how to stream
TV or the desktop screen via WiFi to a WiFi enabled Pocket PC.
I was really enthousiastic in testing this exciting capability and
downloaded Win Media Encoder at once. The articles suggested that the
Windows Media Encoder configured on "Screen Capture" would be
enough. In my case it wasn't. Here are the reasons.

For the sake of clarity I have to mention that it wasn't easy
to broadcast the sound either. After searching the internet, I found
out that I had to configure my sound card, so that its output
becomes input to the encoder. To do this I selected the "Stereo
Out" option and enabled it both in the sound card and in the Media
Encoder.

At this point I supposed that I could do the same with my screen card.
My screen card is an S3 Savage (8MB) on a Toshiba 2800-400 Laptop
running Win2K and it has a Combined Video output that works perfectly.

OK, I know this sounds prehistoric to you, but it still does the job
on my laptop and if finally there is a solution to this problem, my
laptop will be "converted" from a professional to an "entertaining wireless" one as soon as I revert to the next generation....

The laptop is fully updated with regard to Win2K and Directx9c.
I succeeded in transmitting sound and desktop activity to the
Pocket PC, but could not stream any video (wma,mpeg, or dvd).
After doing my research I found out that it is possible to configure
directx, so that DirectDraw option is disabled. If I have well
understood, this cancels the bypass of PC memory and CPU and
sends the video to the screen like any other application. I did this
(deactivation of DirectDraw) and succeed in broadcasting wma
files from Windows Media Player (the old version in this case)
with exceptional quality.
As you can guess, this trick did not work with DVD
and it still created some problems when defining the capture window
in Win Media Encoder. Of course a dvd cannot be reproduced unless
the directdraw option is activated in directx.

So the combined question is:

- Why cannot Windows Media Encoder "see" the C-Video output
of my laptop screen card and take it as input ? This is true with
the sound going back without any need to short-circuit the
headphone-microphone jacks.

- Is this a matter of my screen card being so obsolete ?

- The only way to solve the problem is to by a PCMCIA capture card
and "short-circuit" the screen output of my laptop to it ?

- Is there any configuration possible on the screen card so that
it is recognised as a video source input to the Win Media Encoder ?
(I have already "played" with all options).

- Is there any 3rd party software remedy ?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

P.S. Please note that in my case the objective is to broadcast
wirelessly a dvd movie from my laptop to my pda. Therefore
I really find it weird to need additional equipment (i.e. PCMCIA capture
card) to take back a signal that is already available on my screen...