UPDATE (09/23/2008):
The Kinoma folks have released the Windows Mobile port of their well-known, famous Palm OS player, Kinoma Play. It has excellent (in my opinion, the best on Windows Mobile) online media access features, including YouTube access. No wonder it has become the #1 in the connected media player category of WMExperts' (unfotunately, pretty terse and, CorePlayer-wise, pretty questionable - it has never crashed on me on any of my [numerous] WinMo devices)
roundup. It offers a lot that, currently, CorePlayer can't provide.
(list view)
(playback in Landscape mode with controls shown (normally, they're hidden))
The biggest
advantages of Kinoma Play (as of the current version) compared to the current version (1.2.5) of CorePlayer are as follows:
- it supports Youtube accounts:
- the length of lists isn't constrained: at the end of all lists (including searches), there's a "More" menu item, which allows for loading the data for and displaying the next 20 list items:
This, along with YouTube account support, is really missing from the current, pre-1.3 version of CorePlayer.
Now,
the problems (as of the current (09/23/2008) version). Unfortunately, there are some.
- on (W)VGA devices, the increased resolution isn't utilized. With YouTube, where only H.264 offers 480*320 (as opposed to the 320*240 resolution of Flash-based videos), there isn't much difference; with other video sources like standalone files (or ones coming from podcasts), this might be a huge problem. This also means that, unfortunately, album art and standalone image files are also rendered in low (QVGA) resolution only. This will, of course, not be a problem with low-res (QVGA) phones. Now, with the huge popularity of the VGA Diamond (Pro) and the forthcoming WVGA X1 and HD, more and more users run into this problem. Hope this will be fixed soon.
- There's no built-in support for switching between portrait and landscape orientation. In CorePlayer, you only need to tap the screen to do this. Fortunately, the program automatically rotates the screen if you also rotate the system screen orientation from Settings / System / Screen. This is, however, pretty awkward: CorePlayer's approach is certainly much easier.
- The GUI (and particularly the video playback) is really slow in Landscape, particularly on VGA devices. (QVGA devices fare far better in this respect.) That is, you'll want to prefer using Kinoma Play in Portrait, even with the videos not filling in the entire screen estate.
- Playing back lower-res (QVGA at most) videos take definitely more CPU (and, consequently, battery) than doing exactly the same in CorePlayer.
Unfortunately, video playback speed problems are pretty common with Kinoma Play, particularly with video formats requiring a lot of computation power to decode. This means you won't be able to watch VGA-resolution H.264 movies on your (W)VGA handset. While CorePlayer can play them at almost full frame rate (with 5-10% framedrops at most), Kinoma Play will only deliver about 0.5-2 fps – and only at QVGA resolution.
Note that, stereo audio playback-wise, it works exactly like with the desktop version and unlike with CorePlayer on Windows Mobile. This means clips that are playbed back by CorePlayer in stereo in H.264 mode (for example,
THIS and
THIS) but only in mono in desktop browsers using the Flash player and, of course, in Kinema. On the other hand, clips like
THIS are played back in stereo on both the desktop and in Kinoma but mono only in CorePlayer.
Hope the above-listed bugs will be fixed before long; currently, for YouTube searches / playback / browsing / login, it's far better a choice than the current (again, 1.2.5) version of CorePlayer. If you, on the other hand, don't find CorePlayer lacking in these respects (because, for example, you don't have a YouTube account or don't need more search results than 13), CorePlayer might be a better choice.
