MHTML blues

September 27, 2008 2:04 PM

I have a huge collection of MHT files and would like to view them on my Windows Mobile or Palm device.

I save web pages like a madman. I have about 2000 wikipedia pages, and about 1500 other pages. I use the most recent version of Opera (windows) and use it to save as MHT (single file). It is much more convenient than saving as HTML + folders and images.

However, I'd like to read them on more than my laptop. I have a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone and a Palm T3 PDA. I am an avid Isilo/IsiloX user, but it seems they will never support conversion from MHT.

I have tried a MHT --> HTML conversion program, but it was slow, buggy, and would crash a lot. Definitely not good for the volume I have. A good conversion program would let me convert the resulting files to IsiloX's .pdb file format, which is readable on both devices. That would make me happy.

I have tried browsers on the Windows Mobile device. Neither pocket IE, Opera mini, or Netfront 3.5 will properly open and render a MHT file. I had seen different posters on message boards claiming that netfront 3.5 would open MHT, i tried and got "unable to open page".

My only success with MHT on the PPC device is by using a freeware app called Qusnetsoft MHT Viewer, which will open the MHT file in temp memory, then open it with the default browser. This works pretty good, but the conversion process takes a while, and the rendering is about 85% true. I'd really like something that did this natively and quicker.

Does anybody have a solution for me?

posted by sonicbloom to computers & internet (4 comments total)

There's an MHT extension for Firefox, does Firefox have a Windows Mobile version? (I'm not a Windows Mobile guy so I don't know this.)
posted by sharkfu at 3:18 PM on September 27

From Wikipedia:

MHTML is also supported by Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Excel 2003, OneNote 2003, and PowerPoint 2003.

Is there a Word viewer package for the Windows Mobile device that might open the MHTML files?

Also, it sounds like MHTML is a pretty simple format, so there should be a working HTML conversion tool available. I would try a few more and see if you can find a good one. After that you can use IsiloX to convert to PDB - it's a couple of steps but I don't think it would be too painful.
posted by pocams at 6:15 PM on September 27

Just a complete guess - if you have Microsoft Outlook on your device see if there's any way to open one of the files in that. And maybe try the Windows Help application too?

It might be easiest to just re-save the pages as HTML. Or maybe print them to PDFs.
posted by XMLicious at 6:57 PM on September 27

Yeah, I've tried MHTML Converter 1.1, but it's very buggy and one can only realistically convert 50 or so pages at one time. It crashes a lot as well. And then of course they'd need to be converted again with IsiloX, which is not too bad. I haven't found another worthy converter. Most applications convert to MHT, not from MHT. I could also convert manually using Opera, but that would be extremely labor-intensive.
I will also look into the MS Office Suite, perhaps I can view directly on the device, otherwise I will convert them on the desktop to HTML if possible.
Any other suggestions are welcome.
posted by sonicbloom at 7:15 PM on September 27