With the power of mobile phones more and more people want to watch movies on them. The problem is, a lot of people don’t know where to begin. There are a few different routes you can take to get a movie on your phone. The main two are to buy them from various vendors or you can create them. It is pretty easy to buy them and add them to your phone using Amazon Unbox so let me help you with this one first. I will create another article on how to create them from your library.
What is Unbox?
Amazon has a video on demand service called Unbox. This service allows you to browse Amazon’s library and either rent or purchase a movie. You have a few options available to watch your movie. You can
Watch it online
You can log into your Amazon account and then select your purchased movie. A player loads in the browser. This is similar to watching any YouTube video except you own or rent it.
Download to your PC
Once you install the Amazon Unbox software on your pc you can manage purchase, and watch your videos
Purchase a device that can use the Unbox service.
There are various devices that can be purchased that can link into the Amazon Unbox service. Probably the two most popular ones are the Roku HD Player and a TiVo Video Recorder.
Download to a supported portable device. (the reason why your here!)
In addition to downloading the full movie file, you can also get a portable copy for your device.The list of portable devices is not extensive on the Amazon website but pretty much any Windows Mobile Phone should work ( I have not tested this ). The device just needs to support the Microsoft Play for Sure feature. The easy way to check and see if your device is supported is to connect it to your PC. While in the Unbox software you should be able to see it under “devices” with a drop down for available storage on the device.
Whichever option you choose you will enjoy your movie.
Adding your movie to your Windows Phone.
Once you purchase your movie from Amazon and download it, you can then transfer the portable copy to your phone. There are two ways to get the portable copy of the movie.
You can setup the Amazon Unbox Player to automatically download the portable file by going into Settings | Preferences and choose the option “Also download portable video files when downloading videos”.
The other option is to right click on the video and select “Download portable file to this PC”.
Whichever option you take the full movie file MUST be downloaded before you can get the portable file.
Now that you have the portable file, click “devices” in the tool bar at the top of the Unbox player on your PC. Your downloaded portable files will be visible in the middle of the player (1), and your device on the right (2).
Now just hit the big “Transfer” button.
Once the transfer is complete locate the file on your phone with your media player (on my device there was an Amazon folder created under the default “Videos” folder on my storage card )
Play it and enjoy your movie!
Check back for converting a movie from your library and copying it to your Windows Mobile Phone.
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This is very useful. Kudos to the WM peeps on this one. Too bad us in Canada still don’t have amazon unbox
.
I can’t believe that you guys are so behind on these services.
Nice post. I’ll have to check it out.
As far as I can tell this only works when you purchase a movie or tv show from Amazon. If you just rent it then there is no option to download a portable version of the video. That pretty much makes it irrelevant for most content. Is this really true or has Amazon just not corrected some of the text on their site?
Here are their terms of service for a rental:
Rental: When rented, this video will automatically expire 48 hours after you begin watching it. When you watch online the viewing period starts immediately upon purchase. For each rental, you can either watch online or download—you can’t change your viewing choice once you’ve made it. If you download a rental, you will have 30 days to store the video without starting the viewing period. Rentals can’t be transferred to a portable device.
Sorry if my post was confusing I did not try to add any rented movies, only purchased. The section where I talk about rentals was only to explain what the Amazon Unbox Service was. There are still tons of movies that can be purchased and watched on your phone so I would have to disagree with you that it is irrelevant without the rental option. I haven’t come across a movie yet that could not be purchased and include a mobile copy. However if you are interested in another method of adding movies then you should look at my other post. http://www.simplemobilereview.com/how-to-convert-a-movie-for-windows-phone-zune-zune-hd/
How do you watch movies today on your phone?
I have another option that i am testing and if it works I will post about it. Keep Checking Back
How do I watch movies on my WinMo phone? Been doing it for years by ripping it with free DVD Shrink (but there are many other free applications that will do this, but you’ll need one that ignores the DRM, or copy protection for movies YOU OWN) on my desktop, then converting it (there is also a plethora of freeware aps that convert) to a common format (avi, wmv, mov, etc…basically whatever format the mobile player on my device (in my case, the HTC Touch Pro) will recognize, and just make sure it converts it down to under 4GB, then simply move it to my storage card.
Yes, bypassing DRM or copy protection is all about how ethical you are by not doing it to movies you don’t own, but I refuse to feel guilty or “bad” ripping movies I OWN to watch on my computer or mobile device.
I can’t argue with that logic!! I did post another way to add movies http://www.simplemobilereview.com/how-to-convert-a-movie-for-windows-phone-zune-zune-hd/
I’m sorry, irrelevant was a poor word to use. Many people do like to purchase movies, I just prefer to rent and watch once. So for me the price is unattractive. Great article though, and maybe Amazon will allow mobile rentals some day. Not sure why they do not now. I have “heard” PQ DVD TO IPOD CONVERTER does a good job with dvd conversions. Despite the name it renders movies in mobile sized formats of your choice, they say.
I understand what your saying. I will keep searching for a solution for that one.
Just a note of intrest. I have tried the Amazon Unbox -transfer to a protable device- and it will shrink and move any movie you purchase (or TV show/series) just fine. But the copy is not friendly towards older or even newer phones when it comes to a smooth frame rate. I have an ATT Pure, great phone and plays any movie in a 480×600 format just fine. However Unbox recreates the movie to something higher in res and in turn the movie is very choppy on my phone. There is no option to change this either in the Unbox settings. I ended up using DVD Shrink myself.
That is odd because i am using the TILT2 and the file is the same size on my phone as it is on the hard drive. It also is not choppy at all. But i have seen some of the .MP4 movies i have converted give me some trouble occasionally. On your drive do you have the mobile file? I think the extension is .AMZN. I think it just renames it to .WMV as it copies it to your phone with the license. At least that is what happens for me.
I do like the unbox service in because I was able to watch Battlestar Galactica when I had time to do so. However I also use linux for most everything and do not like rebooting to windows to watch my movies. I also have a zune and was very disappointed that I couldn’t put the portable versions on it. All the videos have drm protection so you can’t even burn them to DVD without going through a very long conversion process with 3rd party software. You CAN stream the videos to an XBox in windows but even that was glitchy, with my videos stopping in random spots and the XBox reporting that it “might” not support the video format. Right…that makes sense.
Yeah I thought it was weird that they did not support the Zune at first but i guess it would interfere with MS model. Now I use Media Center and I have three XBOX’s none of them have any stutter problems. But i am running a gigabit backbone. Wireless does not cut it for streaming. But i wonder if a VM would help you not have to boot into windows? Just run it on top of linuw and watch it in the VM.
I tried it on my Omnia i910 (verizon) with a 6.5.x custom rom and got a device error: unknown error
That’s weird did you get the error on your phone or on your PC?