What PDAs have the horse power to play uncompressed divx, 3GP and H.264?

[NG]

I'm hoping that the HP 4150 with it's 400MHz Intel XScale processor will be enough but have no idea. I know uncompressed divx files can be play on 600Mhz units but don't know about 400 nor anything about PSP or Ipod formats.

[bugster]

You are getting your terminology a bit mixed up. Divx, 3GP and H.264 are all compression methods for video, so none of them are uncompressed. Thats why you need a reasonable amount of processing power to play them, its the de-compression that requires most effort.

Divx is an mpeg-4 format usually in a .avi container.
3gp is a container format and typically holds H.263/Mpeg-4 video.
H.264 is also know as AVC (Advanced Video codec) and achieves even greater compression than mpeg-4.

As to how much 'horsepower' is required to play back these formats, it depends largely on the bitrate the file was encoded at and in some cases the encoding features used. A PDA will probably play divx QVGA resolution at 2-300Kbps, but higher bitrates require more processing power so the answer is less clear. H.264 requires roughly 2-3 times the processing power of mpeg-4 but gives higher quality at the same bitrate or the same quality at lower bitrate.

Basicly, the horsepower you have, the wider choice of source files that will playback smmothly. If you want to guarntee playback on a PDA, encode them yourself.

[NG]

Too true. Uncompressed was the only way to phrase it I could think of at the moment but I do realize that they all are compressed formats.

I have been re-encoding with pocketdivxencoder for my Audiovox Thera but have read posts on other sites that the Dell 600mhz units can play non-re-encoded divx files. I'm sure there may be issues with QPEL and GMC however the idea is still worth considering - and sealing the deal to pick up a new PDA if any would support H.264 or to a lesser extent 3GP.

[vitualis]

All modern Windows Mobile based PDAs can play QVGA DivX 4/5/6 or XviD AVI files with MP3 audio at reasonable bitrates at full speed. Certainly, my old HP h1930 (which runs on a 200 MHz Samsung processor) can do so with TCMP (The Core Media Player, previously known as "betaPlayer").

Some Pocket PC phones that run on the slow TI OMAP processors are the only exception.

On the other hand, almost no PDA can play full frame (i.e., VGA or full frame DVD) DivX at the appropriate bitrate in real time. The exception are those PDAs with hardware assisted MPEG-4 decoding (e.g., the VGA versions of the new Dell Pocket PC with the ATI graphics chip).

Regards.

[celtic_druid]

CoreAVC offers about the fastest AVC decoding around to.