While there are many reviews about netbooks after a few days of use, you hardly find any indication on how the person continues to use it. We all know that new toys are cool in the beginning, but how do new toys affect our habits after a certain period of time?

Over the years, I’ve used numerous devices for different purposes. My first true gadget was a 3com Palm Personal, which I later upgraded to a Pro, so I could use it with my cell phone (infrared) and use the internet on the go. I ten went on to a Handspring Visor Platinum. It was not until I got an iPaq 2210 PocketPC when I started getting into portable video and software development, and after a while, I was forced to get a few devices people requested support for. When I got a PSP, the iPaq was the first gadget that ended up in the drawer next to the Handspring. Due to the bigger screen, as well as the better video format, the PSP became my gadget of choice to watch movies on the go. Bulkier than the iPaq, but it made up for it with the bigger screen. When Apple came out with the first Video iPod (5G) I needed one to make DVD Catalyst work with it (I love this job) and opted for the 60GB model. Eventhough the iPod had a smaller screen, it replaced the PSP due to the storage size. It was great to carry around 1 device filled with more video content than I could watch in a week of non-stop viewing. 10 seasons of Friends, Southpark, Futurama etc, and still have lots of music on there to boot.Next came the Microsoft Zune 30. The first Zune. While it features a slightly bigger screen, it never managed to replace my iPod. The colors looked bad and washed out, and the Zune desktop software was (still is in my opinion) a resource hog and a pain to navigate. I picked it up, made it work with DVD Catalyst, and then it went straight to the gadget drawer.

After the Zune came the Apple iPod Touch. If you have used DVD Catalyst for a while, and followed the website(s) you know how much I love my iPod Touch. While it’s only the 8GB first model, it has replaced all my portable devices with it’s capabilities. It even replaced my computer for answering support questions at nights. Bigger screen, better video quality, and while not as much room as my 60GB iPod, it still has room enough to fit a season of 24 on it with room for a few apps.

Unfortunately, the one thing that caused me to look into a replacement for it is due to some “google labs” options I use in Gmail for providing support. While I type all support questions by hand, there are a few things that are always the same, so I use something called “canned responses” for those whenever needed. Reset DVD Catalyst to it’s defaults, and a thank you note for a PayPal purchase with the link (paypal doesn’t send these out by itself, so I have to do that manually). Unfortunately, for some reason, this did not work in gmail/safari on the iPod Touch, so for sending out those emails, I always had to go back to my computer to answer.

So, because of the Gmail issue, and because I wanted one since they came out, I picked up an Asus eeePC.

I wrote a few articles already on the eeePC, please refer to those for initial impressions, and impressions after a few weeks.

2 Months later.

The eeePC has settled in nicely into my life.

It has replaced my gadgets for the most part. It plays video’s in whatever format I have, and because it runs a full webbrowser (firefox) I have no issues using it for work-emails. During the day, it sits next to my development system, and I use it for emails and non-work stuff, such as checking certain websites for news (slashdot for example). During software testing, when my development system is basically in use, I use it for minor development stuff, and at nights, when I turn off my workstation, I close the screen of the eeePC to put it in standby, and have it close by when watching TV. Once in while I pick it up to check for support emails, or look something up about what’s on TV and such.

When I go somewhere, I usually take it with me, depending on where I have to go and what I have to do. It allows me to keep myself entertained, or do work (if an internet connection is available).

While it has a few games on it, the most used application on the eee is Firefox. It’s always open, and even when the netbook wakes up from standby, it responds fast.

Essential upgrades:

The only issues I have with the eeePC is the out-of-the-box performance and battery life.

I picked up the cheapest 8.9″ harddrive-version of the eeePCs, the 900HD, so it came with the smaller battery. I replaced that with one I picked up from eBay. The replacement battery ($60 or so) is quite big, and sticks out at the back, which is a bit annoying, but the increased batterylife is well worth it. With the defalt battery, it was not capable of playing 1 full movie. The battery ran out near the end of a 2hour movie. The new battery enables me to watch about 4 hours of videos.

The hard drive, while decent in size, was quite slow. The seagate 160gb I replaced with a 320GB 7200rpm Western Digital, and the whole system is a lot more responsive. Especially with Firefox getting bigger and bigger, and a virus scanner running in the background, the difference in speed is phenomenal.

The memory. The eee came with 1GB of memory, which is plenty for Windows XP, however, with the video card taking a share, as well as a few startup programs such as a virus scanner, you will notice a slowdown when you have a few programs running (or firefox with 10 tabs open) I expanded this to 2GB, and everything feels a lot smoother. Switching between running programs is a breeze.

The size:

The 8.9″ eeePC is just the right size for me. The screen is big enough to show me information I need and use without having to scroll, and the physical size of the device is just small enough to make it easy to pick up.

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with my $250 netbook, now if only it had a dual-core processor and a better video card. I hope they come out with a 9″ ION based netbook.

My eeePC 900HD came equipped with a basic 3-cell battery, which, when I put it through it’s first movie, is not capable to play a 2 1/2 hour movie on a single charge. Because of this, I’ve been putting some thought on what affects batterylife during playback, and how the viewing experience can be enhanced.

*Brightness: One of the first, most logical things to keep in mind is the screen brightness. The brighter the screen is set, the more power it drains, and as a result, the battery drain is quite significant. Reducing the brightness will increase battery life significantly.

*Networking: a wireless networking connection takes power to establish and maintain a connection, and continiously puts strain on the battery as well. Turning it off while watching a movie will save battery life tremendously.

*Drive activity: the location of where you have the movie, or if there are programs running in the background. A harddrive or a cd/dvd drive all have moving parts, and when used for video playback they will be continuously be running to be able to run the movie. A Solid State disk, or even a flash card will reduce power useage due to the lack of moving parts.

The above is quite obvious, however, what many people do not realize is that the format of the video makes a huge impact as well.

H264/AVC Video is very processor-demanding. Some of the lower-end systems might even have issues playing video files in this format properly, and on all portable systems available at this time, the processor will need to run at full-speed to be able to keep a fluent playback. On portable devices, such as Apple’s iPod and iPhone devices, some newer Windows Mobile devices, and the upcoming Netbooks with Nvidia chips in them feature hardware acceleration for this video format, which reduces the strain on the processor enough to eliminate the need to run at full speed.

DIVX AVI is less processor demanding, but depending on the version used (DIVX5/DIVX6/DIVX7), there is a difference. DIVX6 and 7 include additional features to improve quality, which also increases processor demand. The DIVX codec options also include quality enhancement filters, such as “deblocking” and “deinterlace” which also put additional strain on the processor, keeping it running at full speed.

XVID AVI is a bit less straining on the processor than DIVX, but the Windows installer (Koepie’s version) does include various options for quality enhancement that are enabled by default.

MPEG1 MPEG2 is considerably less processor demanding than any of the other formats. Even very old computers (Pentium 1, 166Mhz) are capable  of playback of these files, but due to the bigger file size of these files, the hard drive speed comes in to play.

Windows Media WMV Depending on the format itself (VC1, WMV9, WMV8, WMV7) the processor requirements differ greatly. VC1 is used for HD video content, and while it offers great quality, the processor useage is quite high as well. WMV9, the non-HD variant of VC1 is less demanding on the processor, while maintaining a good quality. WMV8 uses less than WMV9, and WMV7 uses less than WMV8.

H263 3GP This format is specifically designed for Cellphones, and requires very little processor power, but results in terible quality on bigger screens.

The way the files are created plays a big difference in performance requirements. Due to its initial design for “portable” devices, DVD Catalyst does not use any real “advanced” options (cabac,quantisizers, degaus etc) for it’s normal conversions. While the “HQ” profiles do use some of them, the default profiles are optimized for sped and compatibility, resulting in faster conversions at good quality. For playback this also assists in battery-life. A basic rule that can be used is that the faster the conversion completes, the less battery-power it will use. This rule does not really apply to people who use the latest systems with the CoreI8 50Ghz 32-core processors, but for the average computer user it is a fairly safe indication.

Besides the compression format itself, the other difference between these is that to maintain the same quality the file-size is directly affected. The higher the processor requirement, the smaller the resulting file can be while maintaining the same visual quality. With the same screen size resolution settings, a H264/AVC video file can be about half the size of an XVID file of the same quality, and an MPEG2 file will be about 4x as big as an XVID file on the same visual quality.

While the file-size would theoretically be an additional battery drain, most video player applications actually “stream” the file from the harddrive. They continuously read from the file to direct it to the screen. So in most cases, it does not matter if the file is big or small, because the drive that actually contains the video file is still used during the whole time you are watching the movie. To eliminate this, a video player application would need to have a memorybuffer that would load a portion of the movie, and then stop accessing the drive until it hits a certain percentage in the buffer so it can load the new data again. In this case, the file size does make a difference, because the bigger the file, the more times the buffer needs to be filled. at a buffer of 64MB, if we have an MPEG2 movie of 4GB in size, or a 3GP movie of 120MB in size, the difference is considerably. The 3GP movie will only need to fill the buffer twice, once every hour if we are talking about a 2 hour movie, while the MPEG2 movie will have to fill the buffer 64 times, or about once every 2 minutes.

Unbelievable Product!

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I’ve had DVD Catalyst 2.5 and had no problems with it. I recently upgraded to the new 3.3 and it’s even better. The selections for your device are easy to understand, and set up was even easier. I have three different devices that I put movies on and 3.3 handled all three with ease. This companies customer service is top notch. They’ve been very helpful and have answered every question I’ve come up with quickly. This is definately worth it!

Tried various other software claiming to do the job. DVDCatalyst is the only one that is easy to use, fast, supports many formats, offers superb quality and allows the user choose their preferred quality/file size ratio. Easy to recall previous settings or default the program to your personal settings. Product support is, quite frankly, the best I have ever received for any software product. Highly recommended.

DVD Catalyst setting “Handheld PC DIVX” and TCPMP v0.71 work great together on the HP Ipaq 4705. Support responded within hours. Movies convert to less than 150mb.

Ive been very happy with this software and cannot give it a high enough recomendation. The few tech support questions I had were quickly answered

I had to purchase 2 others that promised to work.. and be easy.. NEITHER worked.. or were easy and support stunk! I then purchased this one DVD CATALYST.. I first did the trial.. and I had a few questions about how to get it to work.. and the support at dvd catalyst was INSTANT and very helpful.. I had the problem solved and was using it right away! I couldn’t believe how helpful they were ..and I hadn’t even bought it yet.. I have since purchased it.. DO NOT even bother buying another one.. This is it. works great for my palm TX and on my sons video ipod. cool.