• Kinoma

• $30
• $20 with a competitive discount

• Video looks good
• NR70 video is fantastic
• Sound quality is very good
• Player is free

• Not true High-Res
• Producer is expensive

Design:
Cost/benefit:
Coolness:
Overall:

Kinoma Producer
Kinoma Producer isn’t dramatically different from any of the other applications that do video on the palm. The converter allows you to set many various settings concerning audio and video, but where it differs is when you start to go into the higher resolutions.

Kinoma Producer ships with many different device presets, idealized settings for many different machines. It should be noted that Kinoma Player and Producer can do smaller, regular-res video clips, and since the Player itself is free, this is quite a nice prospect for video on all Palm handhelds.

Most of the videos you produce will be in "Cinepak Mobile" form, which appears to be a mode that can be viewed in every Palm OS device. It is based on the patented Cinepak video algorithm that helped launch the digital video era in the 1990's. More on Cinepak Mobile’s quality later.

The Producer can make movies up to 320 by 480, but there’s a caveat. Apple’s QuickTime 5 Pro is required to flip the movies 90 degrees so the movie fits on the NR70 series' screen. The lack of an internal converter on the handheld, or at least one in Kinoma Producer, is bothersome (as QuickTime 5 costs $30 by itself), but the company promised to fix it in the future.

Kinoma Producer can encode movies up to thirty frames a second, but as they say in Detroit, your mileage may vary. Much of the time setting it at 15 frames for a high-res movie is pushing the limit.

The audio can also be set in many different ways, from uncompressed, to disabling it, to my personal favorite "Clié Audio". This encodes the movie’s sound in a rate up to 66 kbps Stereo, and it sounds fantastic in headphones, but very quiet out of the NR70V's speaker. Interestingly enough, you can encode audio without a video picture, so if you’re every looking for a different way to store MP3’s, this is it. In fact, Kinoma Producer has convert from QuickTime, MPEG-1, AVI, MP3, WAVE, AIFF, Macromedia Flash, animated GIF, PNG, and JPEG.

You can select the background for the movie, although this is silly if you fill up the screen. I either left it as white or black, although you can select an image.

The conversion goes quickly enough, but the file size is definitely not a petite thing. A James Bond Trailer that I’ve used as my test subject takes up 5.1 MB, for a high-end 320x480 movie that is 1:00.9 seconds of length. At that rate, it’s about twelve seconds a megabyte, which means a standard 22-minute converted show would take up about 110 MB on a memory card. Ouch.

Kinoma Producer is $20 as a competitive upgrade if you provide the code for another video program, or $30 otherwise. They offer Mac OS X, OS 9, and, of course, your Windows flavor of the application.

Kinoma Player
Kinoma Player is as plain as they come, but since it’s free, it’s hard to complain. In the file manager, you can view the size of the movies, the length, and some basic other information.

It can run videos directly off a VFS memory card, and it does it well, supporting either the Palm/Launcher or Palm/Programs/Kinoma directories. My Bond movie is moving about 80 kilobytes per second off the stick, but it handles admirably on the NR70V.

We know that it sounds great, and that the movies tend to be large, now on to the most important part of any video player, how does it look? In my own opinion, it looks pretty nice.

To call this a high-resolution player is by name alone, because as you can see in the screenshots, it is clearly not as high-res as, say, an image in a photo viewer. I’m going to refer to it as sort of a "medium-res", it’s blocky, but it looks much better in motion. This is similar to the way a single frame of a VCR recording doesn't look all that great but the video in motion looks fine.

Scattered throughout this review are some freeze-frame images. I had a problem converting these images from my Clié using the Macintosh program, but the developers of Screenshot 1.7 were nice enough to convert them for this review. In general, these look better in motion. If you want to see what I’m referring to, visit Kinoma’s website and check out their samples.

Now, what do I think about the video quality? I think it’s fantastic! Many people had set their expectations too high upon hearing of the player: A Palm, even the new Clié, runs at tiny fractions of your computer’s speed. That MPEG file will not look the same as it does on your computer; fortunately, it still looks fine on the Palm.

You can play gMovies with Kinoma player, since Kinoma Player is an extension of it, and in comparing the same clip on both, the Kinoma Player is a noticeable improvement. If you are wondering how this happened, a while back Generic Media decided to stop working on gMovie. Kinoma has licensed it and will keep developing it.

Conclusion
Now, the question is, is it worth it? If you have an NR70, it’s an unequivocal yes. Converting movie trailers, music videos, and even favorite episodes of the Simpsons is a blast. Set it down on a table, flip the screen and leave it open a crack for balance, and plug it into a set of speakers and you’ve got yourself a fun little way to look at movies.

However, as the screen size shrinks, the usefulness does as well. 320 by 240 movies for a normal high res device definitely start to lose ground on their low-res competitors in video quality, compared to, say, a gMovie.

That being said, it’s still easily the best movie player if you’ve got a Clié, and due to the fact that Kinoma Player is free, it’s the best movie player out there, right now anyway. Someday with OS 5 devices we’ll get true high-res players, but until that day comes this is the best thing available.