Kinoma Launches Kinoma Player for Palm OS 5

Posted By: Ryan Tuesday, October 29, 2002 9:24:35 AM

Kinoma has introduced Kinoma Player 1.5, and Kinoma Producer 1.5, an update to its tool for encoding audio, video, and still images. Kinoma Player provides full screen, full motion video playback with synchronized sound on nearly all Palm Powered handhelds and phones. The Player now features compatibility with the new Palm OS 5® for ARM processors, interactive VR objects and panoramas, and support for the Tungsten T handheld.

Kinoma Player 1.5 fully supports PalmOS 5, the first version of Palm OS designed for high performance ARM processors. Through the use of an "ARMlet", optimized ARM-native code, Kinoma Player delivers smooth video playback at up to 30 frames per second, even when played back from removable storage. Kinoma Player also supports the new high density video capabilities of Palm OS 5 enabling video with surprising detail and clarity.

Moving beyond video playback, Kinoma Player 1.5 brings support for interactive VR objects and panoramas to all Palm Powered handhelds. Panoramas allow users to navigate a 360 degree view of a scene. Providing a sense of location that far exceeds that provided by a simple photograph, VR panoramas are widely used in the travel and real-estate industries. VR objects allow users to explore all sides of an object, providing a photorealistic alternative to 3D models.

Kinoma Player 1.5 is fully compatible with the Palm Tungsten T handheld, the first Palm handheld to feature the TI OMAP1510 ARM processor. Kinoma Player provides crisp, smooth video playback on the Palm Tungsten T handheld's bright, high-density 16-bit color screen. Using the 5-way navigation control, users have convenient one-handed access to all major features of Kinoma Player. While video can often overwhelm the storage capacity of handhelds the Palm Expansion Slot with support for SD Memory cards allows over two hours of high quality video to be viewed on the Palm Tungsten T handheld.

Preview versions of Kinoma Player 1.5 and Kinoma Producer 1.5 are available immediately at kinoma.com. Kinoma Player is available for download free of charge and is compatible with nearly all Palm Powered handhelds.

A free trial edition of Kinoma Producer is available for download. The full version of Kinoma Producer can be purchased through the Kinoma Web site for $29.99. Kinoma Producer requires Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS 8.6 (with CarbonLib 1.0.4), Mac OS 9, or Mac OS X. It costs $29.95 (USD). Kinoma Producer VR Edition is required to create VR objects and panoramas for Kinoma Player. The software is initially available to qualified users through a beta program.

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Great thing

speed-angel @ 10/29/2002 9:45:59 AM #
Just didn't know when I can use it on my new T-series with virtual graffiti and OS5

Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?

distrachi @ 10/29/2002 10:07:01 AM #
While video can often overwhelm the storage capacity of handhelds the Palm Expansion Slot with support for SD Memory cards allows over two hours of high quality video to be viewed on the Palm Tungsten T handheld.

Does the Tungsten T have enough battery to last two hours playing "high quality" video? The idea of watching a movie on the commute to work is pretty nice.

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Admin @ 10/29/2002 10:15:16 AM #
Yes, I am told the Tungsten T can run a full screen movie off a storage card and last for roughly 2~3.5 hours. Because of the speed & power of ARM & OS 5, they can put the processor to rest between frames to reduce power consumption and still achive a fluid 30fps. -Ryan
RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Zuber @ 10/29/2002 10:22:43 AM #
Wow,

Are you saying it is possible to actually put the CPU in and out of rest 30 times a second and have a substantial improvement in battery life ? I assume that each time there is a change to the image, the CPU has to do some work.

If so, then every app. should be written so that it puts the CPU into powersave as soon as the application is idle. After all, the device is not multitasking anyway, so if your app. isn't doing anything, then it might as well slow things down and save juice.

Zuber

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Admin @ 10/29/2002 10:27:43 AM #
I have to say that with the sharpness of the Tungsten T screen and the quality of this app, 320x320 movies are nothing short of beautiful.

Lets hope they can bring in DIVX codec support...

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
amflores @ 10/29/2002 10:55:59 AM #
Ok, if you have 1/30 of a second for each frame, how much time does the processor spend in processing the frame? Then how much free time does it have to rest?

Now, you still have to have some charge to keep the lcd on and the speaker, so how much this processor resting -let`s say 1/60 sec- is saving?

I thought that video playing was such a processor-intensive task that it drained your batteries -at least it seemed so when using fireviewer on my m105-, so it really amazes me that you can play such a long movie -without considering the size of the sd card you might need- and also be saving energy by "processor resting" and not falling dead in a short while.

Just curious, it would be nice if someone could explain this a little further...

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
bcombee @ 10/29/2002 12:19:59 PM #
Most Palm OS apps already put the processor to sleep for most of their runtime. Palm OS applications tend to be event driven, and when an application asks for an event and there are none available, the OS will put the device in sleep mode until either the user does something (tap on the screen, hit a hardware button) or the device gets a timer interrupt which lets it check alarms. Current devices are turning the CPU on and off almost constantly in order to get more battery life.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com
RE: Battery capacity of TT?
neoyuan @ 10/29/2002 1:28:59 PM #
Does anyboby know the battery capacity of TT? PPCs use much bigger battery (like 1400mA in iPaq 39xx) to last longer. In Palm world, the biggest one used is only 1000mA by NR70/V.

I wonder how big TT's battery is?

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Altema @ 10/29/2002 1:37:33 PM #
"I thought that video playing was such a processor-intensive task that it drained your batteries -at least it seemed so when using fireviewer on my m105-, so it really amazes me that you can play such a long movie -without considering the size of the sd card you might need- and also be saving energy by "processor resting" and not falling dead in a short while."

Ben is much more of an expert than I, but I'll chime in by saying that the typical 15Fps Kinoma movie only uses about 50% of the processing power on a 33Mhz machine. You can fit a 2 hour movie on a 128Mb card if you are careful on the frame and data rates. However, since the TT has twice the resolution and better sound, the files are just slightly more than twice the size if produced with the default Kinoma setting, three times the size if you go for maximum quality.

An 8.7Mb AVI converted to Kinoma Player results in the following file sizes:

737Kb - M515 default
1,498Kb - TT default
2,227Kb - TT maximum resolution per frame

As for what size card you should get (if we lay aside the "biggest you can afford" rule :) ...

128Mb - Occassional short video clips.
256Mb - long clips and full movies at standard res with frame and data rates reduced.
512Mb - full movies at hi res with frame and data rates reduced.
1Gb - full movies at hi res, and full movies at hi res and maximum quality.

My calculations are not very accurate, as they are based on a 17 second test clip. I'll do some testing on larger files soon which will be much more accurate. I do have a 22 minute movie, but it was manipulated to death to get the size down to 54Mb. It's still pretty good quality though...

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Altema @ 10/29/2002 11:24:38 PM #
Ok, I've got some hard data, so here we go on the file sizes for a two hour video:

Kinoma M515 default - 293Mb @ 40.71Kbps
Kinoma TT default - 602Mb @ 83.6Kbps
Kinoma TT maximum quality - 895Mb @ 124.28Kbps
Original Windows AVI - 2.9Gb @ 401.70Kbps

These figures are for full screen video. Encoding in letterbox (for widescreen) will result in slightly smaller files. Tests were obtained by converting a 22:02 video captured directly from VHS. The video was converted using Kinoma at the various encoding settings, and the filesize divided by the 1,322 second runtime to get the Kbps for each encoding setup. The Kbps was then multiplied by the number of seconds in two hours to get the resulting filesize of a two hour movie.

Remember that are a lot of movies that are less than two hours, and you can trim the frame rate to bring the size down. Yep, I need a bigger card!

BTW, if you are serious about video on your handheld, spend the 20 or 30 bucks and get a card reader for loading the files.

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Fly-By-Night @ 10/30/2002 6:50:11 AM #
I suspect that if you record straight from a digital source (DivX, DVD, etc.) you may get smaller files. VHS is low quality and introduces lots of artefacts (noise) that pretty much any MPEG type compression finds hard to deal with. This is me assuming Kinoma uses some form of MPEG or similar technology.

Would be cool if you could link the firewire port on a Creative DAP Jukebox to the SD/MemoryStick slot on the PDA. Then you might be able to watch the Godfather! Might need some improvements to battery technology though!

FBN

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
Altema @ 10/30/2002 11:53:35 AM #
Yeah, VHS is low quality, but I did not have any DVD movies I was interested in seeing again at the time.

I did convert one of the fight scenes from the Matrix and the clarity was great. I don't think the source affects the size of the Kinoma files though... A two minute VHS cartoon and a two minute portion of a DVD movie came out to exactly the same size after conversion.

RE: Can Tungsten T last 2 hours?
alee @ 10/31/2002 10:30:57 PM #
For what it's worth, a 2 minute DVD clip with audio rendered using the default Tungsten T settings in Kinoma Producer gave me a PDB file that was roughly 8mb. Figuring 4mb/min, a 120 minute movie would take roughly 480mb of RAM without tweaking, so a 512mb card would be ideal. At that level, the video is fantastic, and the audio is "good" -- Kinoma seems to produce adequate audio that seems to be a little staticy.

My guess would be playing around with the frame rates and audio compression would probably bring the size closer to 250-300mb, although I haven't had the patience to render a full movie into avi format and convert it to Kinoma format.

The Kinoma Player does seem to be a little flakey, frequently resetting the Palm. I am looking forward to upcoming versions.

The best

Xaositek @ 10/29/2002 10:22:29 AM #
OMG i just loaded this on my New NX-60 Sony Clie and god is it awesome... makes my NR-70 look like crap in comparison.

--------------------------------
Jason
appleJAC MUG Webmaster
Mid-MO PUG Officer
No-Rulz, Inc. Webmaster
RE: The best - Available RAM on NX60
skccs @ 10/29/2002 11:21:31 AM #
Is this a an japanese or american NX60 you are talking about. I just want go know, how much free RAM the american model shows. Because I ordered via expansys an american nx70v (in Europe sony does not even know when they deliver this model) and now think about cancelling it because the japanese review at spug.net says there is only 11 MB of available RAM (US sonystyle says it has 15 MB available RAM) What ist true!

Christian Stocker

DivX

Zane @ 10/29/2002 10:27:21 AM #
Has anybody with a TT watched a full movie(1.5hr)?
If so,
- did the battery last?
- was the quality good enough?
- how was the sound?
- how much mb did you need?

Problems w/Tungsten T

Dante @ 10/29/2002 11:03:53 AM #
I can't seem to make this work with my Tungsten.

I can look at panoramas/pictures ok.....it will also play video, but i get no audio & it crashes when i play a converted mp3

Anyone have a suggestion?

Can it play MP3s?

Xizor @ 10/29/2002 11:26:26 AM #
I have a Sony ClIE N760C and I'm thinking of making the swith to a Palm Tungsten. Does anyone know whether or not this app fully supports MP3s? Can't be without my music! :-)

RE: Can it play MP3s?
Admin @ 10/29/2002 12:30:57 PM #
I am not sure how well kinoma supports mp3s but you will see some mp3 solutions coming to the Tungsten T soon.
RE: Can it play MP3s?
Altema @ 10/29/2002 1:20:32 PM #
I've converted several MP3's using Kinoma and had pretty good results. I could not give you any impressions about playback quality because I have an M515. I can say that, even on a device with a peizo instead of a real speaker, I could understand the words without a problem. Of course on some recordings you cannot understand the words even on a 1,400 watt studio system, so your mileage WILL vary. I would have to actually hear a converted MP3 on the TT before making a judgement. Native MP3 players should be along shortly.

RE: Can it play MP3s?
Altema @ 10/29/2002 10:43:19 PM #
A bit of bad news if you want to use Kinoma as a substitute method of playing MP3's: Kinoma producer does not provide for stereo encoding, even though the TT has stereo audio output through the headphones. Guess we'll have to wait for the true MP3 players to take advantage of music media.

RE: Can it play MP3s?
emceephd @ 11/11/2002 4:23:13 PM #
Kinoma's translation of .mp3's is okay but not great. As an .mp3 alternative, you can go with AudioPlus 1.2 (http://www.smartcell.com), which converts .wav files fairly well for the Tungsten T. It will convert a stereo .wav file but, again, it doesn't sound great. The short answer appears that we all have to wait for the .mp3 players to come. It sucks. I hate waiting.

RE: Can it play MP3s?
emceephd @ 11/14/2002 11:47:40 AM #
Hey Admin, do you have any inside information on when .mp3 players might be available for us Tungsten T slobs? I just posted a new topic on this in the Palm OS forum. Basically, everyone has something that will convert .wav files into mono sound, no one has a stereo convert program, no one has a short-term solution for playing .mp3 music.

Performance test is cool

Altema @ 10/29/2002 2:27:09 PM #
Good way of checking individual devices or checking for performance problems. I got 31.7 Fps for widescreen, and 29.7 Fps for full screen on a 515 with no overclocking.

RE: Performance test is cool
Dante @ 10/29/2002 4:02:41 PM #
to put that into prespective, on video i'm getting around 300 FPS on my tungsten T....(i assume youre using the little tester thing)

I don't know how much what it's using for the test matters but i was using the porsche boxter video from kinoma's site....

RE: Performance test is cool
Altema @ 10/29/2002 10:55:45 PM #
300 FPS!!!???

Holy smokes! Is that a typo? Do you really mean three HUNDRED frames per second? If so, I don't know what to say. I was impressed with some of the 400Mhz PPC's being able to do 67 Fps, with emphasis being on the "was".

When running the Kinoma performance test, the software runs whatever clip is loaded without skipping any frame asfast as the device can, then calculates the maximum Fps. The only thing that affects the results is if the video is letterbox or full screen. Letterbox will run slightly faster because of the unused space above and below the image.

Please confirm the speed... this may change my mind about waiting a little while.

RE: OMAP Preformance
Admin @ 10/30/2002 12:06:29 AM #
At the Tungsten launch event TI demonstrated a speed comparison with a processor intensive graphics test. They compared a 400mhz XScale mobile chip with a 175mhz TI OMAP, both ran a version of windows CE, but the OS was irrelevant to the demo.

Anyway, both platforms ran the same graphic intensive speed test, drawing polygons and such, the 400mhz unit took 75 seconds to execute; while the 175 OMAP finished in 23 seconds.

What this means is that (like apple hardware) MHZ does not matter, and is not the determining benchmark, the DSP built into the OMAP is the reason for the much faster performance and more efficient power consumption.


-Ryan
webmaster@palminfocenter.com

RE: OMAP Preformance
Altema @ 10/30/2002 12:42:45 AM #
Valuable information... thanks Ryan!

RE: OMAP Preformance
McMagnus @ 10/30/2002 7:46:49 AM #
Valuable indeed! Cool. I'll begin to drool real soon now. I ordered my TT from PalmDirect (Europe) monday night and I really wish TNT:s deliveries were 1-2 days instead of 3-5!

It also makes me wonder why Palm don't advertise these facts more. I mean, it seems they're trying to hide the 144 MHz figure. But why bother when it doesn't matter when it comes to CPU-intensive apps, (read gfx apps).

TT might be slower than a 400 MHz Pocket PC calculating Pi, but I don't use a PDA for number crunching.

RE: Performance test is cool
Dante @ 10/30/2002 9:59:15 AM #
Altima....no...it wasn't a typo....however i just tried the same performance test on a LARGE video (created by myself) and i didn notice a slight performance drop....

however...it still managed 230 FPS! frickin' awesome...lol

RE: Performance test is cool
Altema @ 10/30/2002 1:55:34 PM #
"however...it still managed 230 FPS! frickin' awesome...lol"

Ok, I'm sold... were's the box for my 515?...

RE: Performance test is cool
Altema @ 10/31/2002 2:51:48 AM #
To further put things in perspective, here's a partial quote from a PPC review:

"the H3800 would run the famous Alien video at 14 fps while the same video on the Toshiba e740 or the h3950 was running at under 10 frames per sec (fps)."

Can't install 15 sec movie clip on T665

Draven @ 10/30/2002 1:38:21 AM #
Is there a size limit on Palm Database Files that you can install? I d/led the trial version of Kinoma Producer and it will only let me encode 15 secs of any clip... but after i encode it it won't install on my T665. Anyone have any suggestions?

RE: Can't install 15 sec movie clip on T665
Altema @ 10/30/2002 11:33:19 AM #
The trial version of Kinoma Producer just does 15 second samples. In regards to loading, look on the left side of the Kinoma Producer conversion window, near the bottom. You will see a box marked "export location". Select "Hotsync folder" and pick memory or card, then go ahead with the conversion. It should load the next time you hotsync if you have enough room on your Clie. If that does not work, choose "Source folder" before you convert. This will place the converted file in the same folder as the original on your desktop machine. You can then install it manually using the Palm Desktop install tool.

The 15 second limit only applies to the Kinoma Producer software. The Kinoma Player for your handheld is free and has no feature restrictions.

RE: Can't install 15 sec movie clip on T665
Altema @ 10/30/2002 11:44:31 AM #
PS: Make sure you select the correct device for the conversion. For your Clie T650/655, it is the second from last selection.

RE: Can't install 15 sec movie clip on T665
Draven @ 10/30/2002 10:15:48 PM #
Thanks for your reply. I did all those things you mentioned but it still doesn't work. It seemed that the producer wasn't converting the clip at all. I d/led the sample clips on their site and I could install and view them fine, but when I tried to convert a clip the warning that it only encodes the first 15 secs pops up and everything closes right away. When I look at the converted clip it's 1kb big. Any ideas as to where I'm going wrong?

RE: Can't install 15 sec movie clip on T665
Altema @ 10/31/2002 2:53:48 AM #
Perhaps the converter is corrupted. Uninstall Kinoma Producer, delete the original download file, then download a fresh copy and install. If you get the same problem again, contact Kinoma support via their website at www.kinoma.com


Sound?

TinMan @ 10/31/2002 5:58:07 PM #
First, so far I'm amazed at Kinoma's speed. However, is there any way to get the high-res clips to play with sound?

Even the low-res clips only play (sound) for a little bit (2-3 seconds) then stop (video continues). Any ideas? I am playing from a SD card--I hope that isn't the problem.


-Mike

I sync, therefore I am.

RE: Sound?
jbarr @ 11/1/2002 3:54:22 PM #
It has the same problem on the Sony Clie NX70V. I emailed Kimoma support about it, but haven't heard back from them yet. I'll post anything I hear!

RE: Sound?
Altema @ 11/1/2002 4:47:10 PM #
I had working sound until I installed the 1.5 preview version. Now even the original does not work. Support suggested trying 1.5.2, but problem persists even after hard reset and reload. Hmmm

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