I have a confession, and it's a hard one for a gadget-head and DVD addict to make. Don't laugh, but until recently, I really didn't believe in portable DVD players. I thought you had to be pretty stupid--or just plain loaded--to ante up close to a grand for something that only played DVDs when, for a few hundred bucks more, you could own a DVD-equipped laptop that ran Windows or the Mac OS.

What changed my mind? A little thing called size.

There I was on the plane a few weeks ago, watching Training Day on Panasonic's relatively inexpensive DVD-LV60, a 19-ounce deck with a rather ungenerous 5.8-inch LCD, and I thought, "Hey, I can deal with this." It fits nicely on the tray table, has a pretty decent picture, gets four hours of battery life with the battery pack attached, and barely takes up any room in my carry-on bag.

Now, this is coming from someone who, when it comes to TVs, won't allow anything smaller than 32 inches in the house. But I'm finding that I'm a man of extremes, and that seems to be carrying over to my latest thinking on portable DVD players and mobile video in general.

Going smaller
Instead of making higher-priced portable players, such as Panasonic's DVD-LA95, with so-called large screens (that is, bigger than 7 inches) and fancy features, manufacturers should concentrate on the low end, making more-compact players with smaller screens for less money. The day Sony makes Walkman DVDs that aren't much bigger than Walkman CD players (and plays MP3 CDs to boot) for less than $400, the things will fly off the shelves. Mark my words, Panasonic and Toshiba.

Inspired by my experience with the DVD-LV60, I took a renewed interest in playing movies on my Pocket PC, Casio's Cassiopeia E-200, which I've outfitted with 512MB SanDisk CompactFlash and 128MB MMC cards. (And let me tell you, 640MB of additional memory really gives you a confidence boost; it's like walking around with two double espressos in you at all times.) Depending on the file type--MPEG-1 and WMV are the most Pocket PC-friendly--an average movie runs somewhere in the 128 to 160MB range, while a half-hour episode of The Simpsons usually comes in at around 50MB.

Short films, commercials and movie trailers are easy enough to come by (PocketMovies.net is a good place to start). But to get your hands on any of the fun, full-length features (say, an MPEG-1 version of The Matrix), you'll have to make your own file from a video source using your PC or download one from one of the file-sharing sites such as Morpheus, which requires a great deal of patience (and a disregard for copyright laws, of course). Sites such as Mazingo make it much easier to import Pocket PC-compatible movies and TV shows, but they tend to be either ancient (His Girl Friday, for example) or of the B variety. Also, you have to pay a small subscription fee to download content, which Mazingo promises will improve with time.

Faster frame rates: a must
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with watching movies on your Pocket PC today is frame rates. The magic number is 30fps (the number of frames per second for most television signals), but the best we did was 22fps with a trailer for Star Wars: Episode 2 using PocketTV's MPEG viewer. The video was watchable (with headphones on), but to make this a truly viable movie machine, the hardware and software must improve to the point where you can get 30fps. Battery life is also an issue, but let's get the thing to play smoothly before we worry too much about that.

My dream, of course, is that it's all there in next-generation devices that may be powered by Intel's forthcoming Xscale chips: better video performance, better battery life, cheaper memory, and cheaper forms of it (DataPlay, where are you?). Until then, I'll stick with the compact DVD-LV60 and like-styled DVD players, big as they are.