Kinoma Notes

Wow! We’re honored to have been mentioned for two products in the year-end edition of TreoCentral’s Talkin’ Treo.

First, Kinoma Player 4 EX received some very gratifying kudos.

…NOTHING can do everything Kinoma Player 4 EX can do and at the price, it’s an absolute steal and is my all-time favorite Palm OS program.

Also mentioned was SlingPlayer Mobile for Palm OS, which we created for Sling Media (now Echostar). SlingPlayer Mobile share some of the same core technology with Kinoma Player.

Needless to say, we’re very gratified to be the only software cited in TreoCentral’s excellent year-in-review.

Our thanks to the Harv and the rest of the TreoCentral gang for the recognition, and we’ll keep working hard to make you proud of us in 2008.

• Talkin’ Treo (12/28/2007)

Kinoma would like you wish you and yours the happiest of holidays!

If we haven’t said so lately, thank you for being a Kinoma customer. We appreciate your business, and we hope that we exceeded all of your expectations for software goodness and customer service in 2007.

Posting will be lighter than usual for the next couple of weeks as we celebrate with our families.

After the New Year, we’ll come back refreshed for what will be a very exciting 2008!

Best,

All of us at Kinoma

We recently had a customer who wanted to choose the “best” frame rate for his encoded content.

To that end, his goal was to crank up the frame rate as high as possible. He used Kinoma Player’s Performance Test feature on one of his videos and concluded that the best frame rate for encoding for his Treo was 18 FPS (frames per second).

Unfortunately, there are a couple of incorrect assumptions in there:

• That the result of a Performance Test on one piece of content is applicable to other content
• That when it comes to FPS, “more is better”

Using the Performance Test feature

The Performance Test feature gives you the average maximum frame rate possible with the current video. What it doesn’t do is tell you what would be the “best” frame rate for the current video.

Even though this video has an average maximum frame rate of 54.1 FPS, it needed to be encoded at 15 FPS in order for the most challenging-to-decode parts to play smoothly on a range of devices.

Also, this feature isn’t meant as a predictor for how another video will perform. Similar types of video encoded using the same encoding parameters should show comparable results, though.

Choosing a frame rate

Here’s the secret: For smooth video, always use a frame rate that’s a sub-multiple of the source frame rate. In other words, choose a frame rate that divides evenly into the frame rate of your source.

Why? Imagine 30 keys on a piano, representing one second of source video. A frame rate of 18 FPS is like trying to play 18 of those keys if they were spread out across the same space. At first, your finger will line up with the first key — so far, so good. But then your finger will hit a combination of the 1st and 2nd key, then a combination of the 3rd and fourth keys, etc. It would sound pretty horrible, and the equivalent in the video world is stuttering.

For 30 FPS video — NTSC video is technically 29.97 FPS, but it’s generally acceptable to round it up when encoding — good choices include 30, 15 and 7.5 FPS. 15 FPS is a great starting point.

A frame rate of 7.5 FPS seems a bit crazy, doesn’t it? But a frame rate of 7.5 FPS doesn’t mean that half-frames are being encoded. Since 30 divided by 7.5 is 3, it simply means that every third frame is being encoded.

And knowing is half the battle

Now that you know how to choose frame rates, be sure to check out the Kinoma Forum if you have any additional questions about encoding content for Kinoma Player.

The Emmy Awards celebrate the best in television. They held the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday.

As they announced the nominees for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, they briefly celebrated the best in mobile television by showing audience members enjoying clips from those nominees on mobile devices.

To show The Office on a Treo, the Academy chose Kinoma Player.

The Office nominee won that particular award. That’s probably a coincidence, although we suggest that all future nominees ask specifically to be shown using Kinoma Player just in case.

“We’d like to thank the Academy, our wonderful customers…”

The camera feature built into your phone is barely as good as the first consumer digital camera (Apple’s QuickTake 100) introduced in 1994.

The camcorder feature built into your phone can’t compete quality-wise with VHS, introduced more than 30 years ago.

And yet, even this basic photo and video functionality becomes revolutionary as it becomes ubiquitous.

Today our friends at Palm posted some people-powered history on their blog — Barry Bonds’ 756th* home run. With Kinoma Player, you can watch the YouTube video on your Treo too.

Even the smallest crowds will include at least a couple people with the basic tools — however rough — necessary to capture an event. We’re all potential photojournalists, and we live in an exciting time when more and more of us will watch video on our smartphones, and sometimes create it there too.

• Home Run #756 [The Official Palm Blog]
• Barry Bonds 756th home run taken with a Treo [YouTube]