Another great advantage of streaming a movie direct from from your PC to your
PDA is that you don't need an external SD or CF card to store the entire movie.
There's also no need to wait for the entire movie to be encoded to Pocket PC
video format before you can start playing it (a long wait if you've got a not-so-powerful
processor like I do!)

I'm using a Dell Axim X50 and streaming the movie from my 1.8 GHz laptop with
512 MB of RAM.

You must have a wireless LAN already up and running at home, and of course,
a PDA with a wi-fi adapter.

On the server PC:

1. Install Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. Download
it here for free from Microsoft [1]

2. Open Windows Media Encoder (Usually installed in Start -> All Programs
-> Windows Media)

3.You will be presented with a New Session Wizard - select
Custom Session

3. You will now see the Session Properties window. The first
thing we need to do here in the Sources tab is to select the
source of the stream. You can have more than one source but for this example,
we're going to use only one source (Source 1)

If you are streaming a video file, select Source From: File.
If you are streaming from a device, such as a Screen Capture, or a TV tuner
card, select Source From: Device.

You can stream different types of video files, such as DivX AVI, VideoCD .dat
files, MPG and WMV. You can even stream just audio files such as MP3 and WMA.

Click Browse..., and select the video file. If the file is
large, you will have to wait for a few seconds while it loads. You can proceed
one the filename of your video file appears in the File Name
field..

In this example, I am going to stream a DivX AVI movie file.

4. Next, click on the Output tab. Select Pull From
Encoder. The port number is 8080 by default, but you can choose a different
port. Try clicking on Find Free Port to find a free port you
can use. Now would be the time to note down the address of the streaming server.

For example, my computer's IP address on the LAN is 192.168.0.1. I've selected
port 8080 for this stream. The address I would use to pull the streaming content
would be http://192.168.0.1:8080

5 . Next, click on the Compression tab.

Destination: Pocket PC.

Video: Pocket PC standard video (CBR) - you may also choose
Pocket PC Widescreen Video (CBR).

Audio: Voice quality audio(CBR) - the default is CD
quality audio (CBR). I chose voice quality audio to make the total bit rate
smaller for faster performance.

6 . This is usually enought to start streaming.Click Apply.
You can go to the other tabs to tweak the settings further if you want.

Before you start the encoding, you want to set up your PDA first.

On your PDA:

Open up Windows Media Player. Go to Menu -> Open URL. Enter the address
of the stream (noted down in Step 4 above). e.g http://192.168.0.1:8080.
Don't press Play yet!

Go back to the server PC, click on the green Start Encoding
button at the top and you're all set. You should see the screen below after
you press Start Encoding.

Back to your PDA, press Play on Windows Media Player and the stream will start
buffering for a short time, and then it will play.