Tea Vui Huang has developed a new application that converts mp3 files into Multimedia Messages (MMS), called bite-size podcasts. A MMS message is a multimedia presentation that encompasses images and audio clips and is ditributed over the cellular network to compatible mobile phones.
This new software converts podcasts into chapters of MMS messages. The MMS podcasts can then be fetched on demand by the user, or pushed to mobile device on a subscription basis.
Since most mobile phones are not able to play MP3 audio files, but can play AMR audio files, this distribution format makes sense for mobile usage. However most mobile phones can only process MMS messages with a 100 KB limit in size, limiting these bite-size podcasts to messages of 50 seconds.
The format is best suited for brief podcasts, where a 5 min file can be converted in 6 chapters of approximately 45 seconds each. AMR files are 3-6 times smaller in size when compared to mp3 files.
Another application by the same developer is Mobilecast, a podcast-to-AMR converter. Mobilecast runs with iPodder after each podcast download. It will split the Podcast into segments of 10 minuntes AMR (NB/WB) audio files for the mobile phone.
A third application software, under testing, converts podcast into J2ME Midlets. The J2ME Java Podcasts can be downloaded to the mobile like other Java application.
