Comments on: Kinoma Releases Kinoma Media Album

Kinoma has released a new Kinoma Media Album, which has been jointly created by Kinoma and Tribeworks. The new software allows users to assemble videos, photos, and sounds on a PC and deliver them to Palm OS 5 handhelds as an interactive media album.

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Yes, but...

Hal2000 @ 5/19/2004 8:44:40 PM #

Is it fast and easy?

(silent first post dance)

Zodiac2/T616
1.128 gigs under the hood.

RE: Yes, but...

Geezer @ 5/20/2004 4:20:06 AM #

The real stumbling block is the proice tag and the deployment. It sounds like a great feature set - and hopefully should run OK on a T|C or T3 and any future Cobalt device but, unless it is bundled with the system or available free, precious few will use it. This would limit the option of authoring anything for the Palm platform.
The lesson to learn here is from the Flash plug in for the PC/Mac browser, free widely distributed and easy to get (often pre-installed).
With a widely established user-base, content creators will write for it which makes the format compelling as success breeds success.
I would love to see this make Palm and Kinoma prosper further, but with this model, I'm afraid I doubt it...

RE: Yes, but...

gilbas99 @ 5/20/2004 5:39:42 AM #

But isn't the player pre-installed on PalmOne devices? The problem with kinoma is that video files require conversion. The future is for tools like MMPlayer that can handle multimedia on their own native formats.

RE: Yes, but...

UncleRedz @ 5/20/2004 6:45:05 AM #

As long as they insist on using 15(?) year old video technology they will not be taken seriously.

If they added support for other more recent video codecs, such as MPEG4 (isn't this the standard these days?) as well as better audio then they would be very interesting. There player is nice, clean and simple to use and they have support for interactive content as well.

As it is now, PalmOne have taken some steps into the right direction with MPEG4 in Zire 92, there is MMPlayer and now SmartMovie as well. As I see it Kinoma better start working on core functionality before they are out of the race compleatly.

RE: Yes, but...

UncleRedz @ 5/20/2004 6:56:01 AM #

..sorry, typo, Zire *72*.

RE: Yes, but...

Geezer @ 5/20/2004 8:45:52 AM #

Good points all, but the other one which strikes me, is that most users want to have linkage and interactivity. For example, its great that Kinoma allows the user to go through VR, like QuickTime (I think the people behind Kinoma came from Apple anyway) but what you can't do is click a link to another scene, open a web page, view the content within a web page, open blocks of text, jump to a related movie, pull inofrmation from a database etc. in short, all the things which have become standard to a user of any aprticular platform these days. I think that's the real problem, and, yeah, it would be good if it could read other formats - just as QuickTime can.

RE: Yes, but...

JKingGrim @ 5/21/2004 7:52:45 AM #

The future is for tools like MMPlayer that can handle multimedia on their own native formats.

Nah. The future is the media player that comes out of the box in Cobalt.

I thought the 72 played .asf files only. Is .asf an mpeg4 file?

Kinoma Video... still a piece of crap!

T.W.G @ 5/21/2004 5:53:51 AM #

hi,

sounds hard, I know but it still is!
Watch videos with sound on a Pocket PC and you'll put the Palm ashamed back in your pocket... very bad!

Thomas

T.W.G www.twgmusic.de

Palm Powered Handheld Reviews from T.W.G at: www.pdaforum.de

RE: Kinoma Video... still a piece of crap!

Altema @ 5/21/2004 1:41:35 PM #

"Watch videos with sound on a Pocket PC and you'll put the Palm ashamed back in your pocket... very bad!"

This is 2004. When was the last time you watched a 480x320 video at 25 fps in full stereo on your Pocket PC? Oh, that's right... you can't.

The only PPC out there with enough screen resolution does not have enough horsepower.

RE: Kinoma Video... still a piece of crap!

T.W.G @ 5/22/2004 6:19:10 AM #

HI,

actually PPC (Toshiba) have 640x480px resolution.
I always "played" with the Kinomaproducer included with my Palm (Tungsten C).
And still on the Tungsten T3 (which I sold for the TC) ;-) video-quality (pixelized) and audio are very bad compared to the PPC-Hardware.

Let's see what Garnet brings to life ;-)

Thomas

T.W.G www.twgmusic.de

Palm Powered Handheld Reviews from T.W.G at: www.pdaforum.de

RE: Kinoma Video... still a piece of crap!

tfftruoa @ 5/23/2004 3:50:36 AM #

I didn't put it back in my pocket. I put MMPlayer into fullscreen landscape and played the exact same file.

Have you tried 320*480 videos at 25fps and stereo sound on kinoma? It's pixilated. It displaces the status bar on the T3. It takes up huge amounts of memory. It's not a good solution.

If there was an equivilant codec to cinepak mobile for PPC, it's videos would suck just as much. It's kinoma's problem, not Palm OS's. Kinoma just uses a terrible codec. It does a good deal of the decoding work for the palm. This is faster and easier for the device, but makes files larger. To compinsate for this larger file size, kinoma reduces the quality on video dramatically, and even more so on audio (it's ok for movies, but with music videos you can really notice).

The one structural advatage kinoma has is that it works on OS4 devices, which don't have the processing power to handle mpeg files. Currently, it also has the advantage of being able to be stored in RAM. The presintation and panoramic abilities are also nice, but that seems more of a phote app thing than a movie player.

The Federation for the Responsible Use of Acronyms

RE: Kinoma Video... still a piece of crap!

Altema @ 5/24/2004 2:30:42 PM #

I use MMPLayer as well, and agree that any image quality issues of Kinoma are due to their software, not the OS. Anyone who has seen a still captured from MMPlayer knows the almost photographic quality. Even so, I must applaud Kinoma for coming up with something which works on everything from a 2Mb Zire on up. MMPlayer only works on OS5 devices.

BTW T.W.G., when I said "The only PPC out there with enough screen resolution does not have enough horsepower.", I was talking about the Toshiba. It is the only device with VGA, but uses a 400Mhz processor which is not enough to do full screen video. Even the makers of Pocket-DVD Studio state this on their website. I've had the HP iPaq 2215, Tungsten C, and T3 all at the same time playing the same video, and the iPaq was certainly the low end device in image quality. I did prefer the iPaq to the TC due to the physically larger screen, but the T3 had the largest screen and the highest resolution. Both the TC and T3 had better color saturation though...