Product Reviews

PDAs/Phones

Kinoma Kinoma Producer and Player 3 [Computer Shopper]
COMPANY: Kinoma	PRICE: Producer $30 (around Ł17); Player $20 (around Ł11)
RATING:	ISSUE: 215 DATE: Jan 06

Kinoma sells transcoding and playback programs for Palm OS devices in the form of Producer and Player. Kinoma Producer is very easy to use. Just drag the video files you want to convert on to its window and select the destination Palm OS device and video quality from three drop-down lists. The program chooses the appropriate video preset to give what it thinks will be the best performance on that device, and the files are then ready for transcoding. You can override this preset and adjust every aspect of video and audio quality if you want to.

Kinoma Producer can transcode video compressed with



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any codec, including DVD movie VOB files, but it needs QuickTime to be installed and only uses MPEG4 or CinePack Mobile codecs for output. Audio compression is limited to AAC, and this may create playback problems, since few Palm OS video players can handle this codec. Fortunately, Kinoma Player can, making it the ideal player for use with Kinoma Producer.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work terribly well. To be fair, when using Kinoma Producer's recommended presets playback was smooth enough, but no wonder as the resolution is always less than full-screen. With the Sony Clie PEG-TH55 selected as the destination device, 'high-quality' video came out at 160x120; with the Palm LifeDrive it was 320x240. When we switched to full-screen 320x480 video the Kinoma Player went into slideshow mode on the Clie, dropping swathes of frames in the process. This wasn't a hardware problem, either - the same file played flawlessly using a different video player.

Since Kinoma Producer creates transcoded video that only Kinoma Player can play, and Kinoma Player needs a high-end handheld to play full-screen video well, this combination is best avoided unless you value ease of use over performance.