TCPMP
WM 6.0 Direct Download (Download Page)
For the past couple week’s I’ve been trying to do my part and take mass transit to work. Its only a 15 minute ride on the bus, which happens to the perfect about of time to toss on some tunes, check my favorite RSS feeds and respond to e-mails. The first couple of days I used Windows Media Player 10 Mobile for mp3 play back, but soon got annoyed at the controls, and song/album selection. I finally caved and dug up the CAB file for TCPMP (I was holding out until the BetaPlayer is released) and I was very pleasantly surprised.
TCPMP’s interface doesn’t look as slick as Windows Media Player, but I love all the features and extended functionality.
Pros
- Easy selection of files in the file system for playback. Select entire folders or individual files for playback.
- Easily create/save/manage play lists on the fly by selecting individual/groups of files from the file system.
- Doesn’t rely on ID3 tags (Unlike Windows Media Player’s library which lists by file meta-data ie. Artist, Album, Genre, etc.)
- Easy to track/scrub through a song.
- Plays a boat-load of media formats, including DivX. This makes it great for playing your movies/tv shows that are encoded with non-Microsoft codecs (aka pretty much everything oput there)
- Handles album artwork.
- Can create shortcuts for almost everything in the “Settings” menu
- Tons (and I mean A LOT) settings that allow tweaking audio and video playback.
Cons
- Interface could be more polished/slick.
- Music playback sometimes stutters when I’m running a couple apps and typing a text message (this is due to lack of resources).
- Doesn’t automatically mute for the duration of the phone call. It will must when you get the call, but when you answer the call it will resume playing — strange behavior.
- Not skin-able?
There are also additional playback plug-ins available at bottom of the TCPMP Download Page that allow you to play FLAC, AC3, FFMPEG, VORIS, and other file formats.
Depending on the size/quality of your videos you may have to decrease the Video quality to “Low” or “Lowest” .. this shouldn’t make much of a perceivable drop in video quality (the Windows Mobile Smartphone’s screen is so small that any decrease in “source” quality is washed out by the small resolution) , but the playback will be much smoother. I had to do this for my Flight of the Conchord’s clip (as seen above in the screenshot) which was 240MB for a 26 min file @ 624×352 .. I think videos that have a native resoluton of 320×240 will play back without issue but I have yet to test this theory.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
There will never be a BetaPlayer. The developers of TCPMP decided to start charging for new versions of their player and called it CorePlayer instead of BetaPlayer. http://coreplayer.com/content/view/28/69/
I have used both the TCPMP version you posted above and the latest version of CorePlayer. CorePlayer has an updated interface and more features, but it has terrible performance compared to TCPMP. It wasn’t even usable for watching video on the Blackjack II.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
ye this is correct, it was stated in one of my forum posts that TCPMP has changed to coreplayer.
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
gtg,
where does it say that BetaPlayer will not longer be developed.. if you goto http://www.betaplayer.com it doesn’t make any mention of that… on TCPMP’s Download page it says “This open source media player project is discontinued. Check out the commercial CorePlayer software or the soon to be released open source BetaPlayer project.” … it makes it sound like BetaPlayer and CorePlayer are two different products.
i wouldnt be suprised if they scrapped the open source Betaplayer project and cornered the marker with CorePlayer.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I admit that I’m just assuming they scrapped BetaPlayer. The reason I’m assuming this is because the message at http://www.betaplayer.com hasn’t been updated since January 2, 2007. That’s 19 months with no update or release.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Brain fart… 18 months.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I really enjoy this site, I came to it from your Blackjack site! I even linked to you from my own blog, keep up the great work!
Tommy Nunley
July 15th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Great article, I’m just curious what file format and video settings you were able to play videos on. I encoded several movies to 320×240, 25 fps with mp4 and 3gp, both file formats are not only choppy, but the audio lags horribly.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I just downloaded the KinomaPlayer and it has got to be the best thing since sliced bread!! Check it out:
http://www.kinoma.com/
You can use the free version or get the full version by buying it or doing TrialPay (which is what I did).
September 18th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
skyfire is the way to go for smartphone flashplayer.
skyfire works excellent on bjII .. its the web on the phone.
no plug-ins , or anything needed. go to skyfire.com and join up today.
October 5th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
drewba -
I too converted several clips to 320×240 w/ 29.5 fps and got the same problems you got. What i did is on the media player i went to Menu>Options>Video and unchecked “scale to fit window”. The clip played smooth and audio was right on, but the thing is the picture was too big. Imma try to scale the picture
November 18th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Can this play .avi format?? if not what media players will work?
November 18th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Jason, Chances are that it will play your AVI files (it all comes down to the codecs that the avi files are encoded with)