I was pleasantly surprised when I recently checked out Lathe™, a software tool from Omniquiti that converts video files for playback on myriad supported devices, including Palm OS PDAs and Palm Treo phones. I had a couple of minor quibbles but, overall, I liked it quite a bit.
On the plus side, this is probably the most user friendly video conversion program we’ve seen. After downloading Lathe™, I opened it and went to the “Pre-Sets” window where I found pictures of all the supported devices. I selected the Tungsten E3 device, then used the “rotate” option at the bottom of the pre-sets window to put the finished video into landscape mode.
Next, I went to Lathe’s Video Input window on the main page and selected a sample video from my PC. It didn’t seem like there was anything left to do so I decided to click start and see what happened.
What happened was, it worked. Pressing the Start button activated the conversion, which seemed fairly quick. Once completed, I transferred the file to my Tungsten and it played back beautifully – smooth video with good color and very good audio.
In addition to being easy to use, Lathe™ seems to have excellent compression as well. The file I converted was a copy of My Big Fat Greek Wedding originally recorded from Tivo. The movie is about one hour and forty minutes long. The original file was in MPEG2 format and was 5.38GB. This file was converted by Lathe in about 45 minutes and the resulting file was 208 MB – meaning I could put a full movie on a 256MB SD card with room to spare. I thought this was pretty impressive, particularly since it played back well. Omniquiti claims I could make the file even smaller if I wanted to by adjusting the default settings but they say they have already “pre-optimized” the defaults for what they consider to be the best combination of small file size and good quality playback. The default settings seemed fine to me.
Now for a couple of negatives – but they’re not biggies. Although I found this program very intuitive and was able to figure it out without instructions, I did think it was a bit odd that there weren’t any instructions included. After poking around on Omniquiti’s website, I did find an “Easy Start” guide posted in their forum but if Omniquiti’s goal is to make this really easy even for novices (as it seems to be), they would do well to include some basic instructions with the download.
One thing that would have screwed me up if I didn’t know it ahead of time is that Lathe optimizes Palm OS video files for playback on The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS (commonly referred to by geeks as TCPMP). While I think this was a smart choice because it allows for the excellent compression referred to above, Omniquiti should do a better job of pointing out that Palm users need to download and install the free TCPMP in order to make use of Lathe.
Minor quibbles aside, I have no problem recommending Lathe to anyone that is interested in video playback on their Palm device. Lathe is really easy to use, provides very good results and, at just $4.95, it’s also one of the cheapest downloads we’ve run across in awhile.
You can check Lathe out here.
- Jason McLoughlin [Leigh, Lancashire]
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