Kinoma Notes

Since Kinoma Player 4 EX is a breeze to use, there can be a ten­dency to think of it as sim­ple under the hood too. But don’t let looks deceive — under that straight­for­ward UI lies some sophis­ti­cated technology.

Take inter­net audio. Some Palm OS audio play­ers can play files from a URL, but they’re really just down­load­ing. “Play-while-downloading” works okay for short audio files like music, but it’s a pain-in-the-Palm for pod­casts, audio books, con­certs, and other inter­est­ing long-form audio.

Down­load­ing requires the entire file to be down­loaded — even if you don’t have time to lis­ten to the whole thing in one sit­ting — so you need enough stor­age to keep the whole thing around. Also, down­load­ing doesn’t allow you to skip ahead to parts that haven’t yet downloaded.

But with Kinoma Player, you can almost always stream those same files.

Stream­ing means that you don’t have to worry about how much free stor­age space you have, that you can stop and start lis­ten­ing when­ever you like, and that you can jump around wher­ever you like at any time — great for audi­tion­ing the new pod­casts we bring you in the Kinoma Media Guide.

Kinoma Player even remem­bers where you were in a stream so you can con­tinue right where you left off.

Down­load­ing is use­ful in some sit­u­a­tions, and Kinoma Player sup­ports that too. Check out this post for details on how to use Kinoma Player’s down­load­ing capa­bil­ity to place-shift your media from the inter­net to your device, allow­ing you to enjoy your favorite pod­casts and audio books even when you’re not connected.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma Player. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.