Kinoma Notes

“Okay, okay,” you say. “Kinoma Player 4 EX is the best con­nected media browser for Palm OS. But what if I’m ever not connected?”

Kinoma Player also plays local media, of course. You can trans­fer media files pretty eas­ily from your PC to your Treo’s SD card.

What you may not know is that you can cut out the mid­dle­man by using Kinoma Player itself to place-shift con­tent from the inter­net to your device, allow­ing you to enjoy it even when you’re not connected.

Nor­mally, Kinoma Player streams con­tent when­ever pos­si­ble. Stream­ing con­tent isn’t sav­able, because Kinoma Player keeps only a small por­tion of it around at any given time — basi­cally, what’s cur­rently play­ing plus a few sec­onds extra to help even out net­work irregularities.

When Kinoma Player is stream­ing con­tent, the title area looks like this:

A lesser-known fea­ture of Kinoma Player is that you can tell it that you pre­fer to down­load instead of stream media. To turn on this pref­er­ence, choose Stream­ing Pref­er­ences from the Media menu, then turn on Pre­fer down­load to stream­ing. To avoid run­ning out of inter­nal mem­ory, we also rec­om­mend that you tell Kinoma Player to down­load to Exter­nal stor­age.

When Pre­fer down­load to stream­ing is checked, Kinoma Player down­loads and tem­porar­ily saves what­ever it’s play­ing when­ever pos­si­ble. Kinoma Player shows you that it’s down­load­ing with a new down­load icon in the title area, just left of the Back icon in the upper-right.

When you see this, you can tell Kinoma Player to save what it’s down­loaded until you delete it. Just click the new icon, and Kinoma Player will show you that it’s sav­ing the down­load with a check­mark on top of the down­load icon.

Note that you need to click the down­load icon before your down­load is com­plete. If you try to go back while you’re down­load­ing some­thing you’ve told it you want to save, Kinoma Player will warn you before it can­cels your download.

As I wrote this, Kinoma Player needed about 10 min­utes to down­load a 60 minute episode of This Amer­i­can Life. Your mileage will vary depend­ing on the type of net­work you’re on, cur­rent net­work con­di­tions, and the data rate of the file you’re downloading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma Guide, Kinoma Player. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.