On of the best things about having a Palm is listening and watching Podcasts. There is the PA podcast with Tyler of course, excellent. Also essential listening/viewing are TWIT and DL.TV. Using iTunes to download, Card Export or drivemode on your Palm, and a folder syncing utility like Allway Sync, you're all set for multimedia enjoyment.
There is one drawback however. The power of humble Palms like my Tungsten E often means that play back is jittery - reduced to very few frames per second and jumpy audio. Then I discovered the BBC news video podcasts and they play very well, 25 frames per second, great audio. Why did these play well and others were jittery?
Well it seems that most video podcasts are aimed at ipod video, or dedicated portable media players. These machines have powerful chips designed for video play back, a palm does not. So is it possible to get good smooth video playback from podcasts on your palm? Yes it is.
What you need is a video transcoding program. There are several shareware ones out there that look good. I downloaded an excellent open source freeware transcoder called MediaCoder. 
It's a little difficult to understand, video transcoding is a minefield, but the program has some plugins to help you transcode. Modifying some of the settings from a plugin will get you well underway.
Here is an example of how I used it. I have dl.tv downloaded via iTunes. In MediaCoder the original file has a resolution of 640x480 and bitrate of 519Kbps. This is way to high for a Tungsten E to handle. Choosing the iPod plugin sets the transcoding settings, and reduces the resultion to 320x240, (320x320 is the Tungsten E's resolution). I set a lower bitrate by hand in the Video tab, to around 300Kbps. Ten minutes of transcoding and I had a smaller file (80MB smaller) that plays much better on my palm!
I looked at the BBC video files and they have a bitrate of 256Kbps and resolution of 320x240. That seems to be around the best settings for Palm playback.
So if you like me think that you can use a Palm instead of a video iPod (with some geeky helper programs to assist). Then give MediaCoder a shot!
By the way it will also convert your home videos into formats for writing VCDs, SVCDs or DVDs on your home DVD player. Or using the same procedure as above to put them on your palm.
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