Portable media players are great little devices that provide entertainment and help pass the time when traveling. Depending on the source material, creating content for mobile devices is not always an easy task. Pinnacle has introduced their easy-to-use Mobile Media Converter software that is designed to convert a variety of video files or un-encrypted DVD movies to mobile media players such as the Sony® PSP™, Apple® iPod®, Creative® Zen, Archos™, Microsoft® Zune, 3GP and MPEG-4 capable mobile phones and more. The software is available for only $29.99 retail, making it very affordable. It is also a simple application that doesn't take up much hard drive space and is Vista compatible. According to the website, the software uses high-quality DivX technology and is optimized for hyper-threading technology and new generation dual-core processors. We ran all our tests on a Sony Vaio laptop (Core Duo T2050 1.60GHz 1GB 80GB).

User Interface
There are four sections that need to be defined to start the conversion process. The source can come from a variety of file formats (MPEG, AVI, WM9, or DVR-MS) including unprotected DVDs. The user can also preview the source material on the built-in player. If your system has an iPod with iTunes or a PSP connected, the software will list the player as an option for the Target Device. The user must then choose a file name and finally select the compression used for the target device. Four levels of quality with various bitrates are available for each of the two target devices. Obviously better quality video will require more space on the media player, so the application lets the user decide quality versus quantity. Once the four steps are complete, the user clicks on the Start button and the conversion begins.

The number of target devices (iPod and PSP) available on our version seemed like a big limitation until we downloaded the latest software update from the Pinnacle website. Once the new version was installed, several new target devices became available, more than doubling the number of options. The software also works well for other portable media players that support MPEG-4 and H264 file formats. We successfully downloaded a large video file to our BlackBerry 8820 and it looked great. Conversion times for a two hour movie took about 30 minutes.

Conclusion
The Mobile Media Converter software worked flawlessly during our testing period and the results were consistent. Those looking for a fast and convenient way to get content to their portable devices will benefit from this software. The Mobile Media Converter is a no-frills product that does a specific job well and for $29.99, it is hard to go wrong.

- Rita Nakano

Laptop: Sony Vaio VGN-N130G (Core Duo T2050 1.60GHz 1GB 80GB)
Media Player: Microsoft Zune
Mobile Device : BlackBerry 8820

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