Watching Technical Session on a Pocket PC
Recently I discovered (thx Faan) a great way to fill up some useless time, like driving to my work: listening to technical sessions on my Pocket PC. Today a lot of great resources are available that can be downloaded and saved on a Pocket PC to watch while you're on the road. Even sessions with video can be saved since large memory cards (+128 MB) are not that expensive. Here is a list of resources that I know, please let me know if you know others:
- .NET Rocks
- MSDN TV
- The .NET Show
- VBTV (for relaxation :-)
- SYS-CON RADIO at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
- Dr. Dobbs TechNetCasts (too bad they are not updated anymore, but some great sessions can be downloaded)
I experienced some problems watching the MSDN TV sessions on my Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 2003. It seems that the Windows Media Player 9 Series for Pocket PC do not support the audio encoding used for the MSDN TV sessions. But luckily Microsoft has a nice (free!) tool to easily create and convert Windows Media files: Windows Media Encoder. With this tool you can convert files to a format suitable for Pocket PC.
Microsoft USA Webcasts has an huge list of recorded webcasts, but these can not be viewed on a Pocket PC. It's possible to play the sessions on your normal pc and record the audio output so you could listen to that output on your Pocket PC. But it would really be a killer feature to be able to listen to the recorded sessions in their original format. The site tells that starting from October 14th, they will switch to Microsoft Office Live Meeting (instead of Interwise), so lets hope Office Live Meetings can be viewed from a Pocket PC (please!!).