Kinoma Notes

One of the coolest things about Kinoma software is its strong support for standards. Kinoma has always blazed the trail in supporting web and media standards on mobile.

The benefit of using standards is that Kinoma software works with hundreds of other standards-based products and web services. One great web services you can use with Kinoma Player is Yahoo! Pipes.

For example, let’s say you find a really interesting podcast feed that mixes blog entries and podcasts in the same feed. That’s generally considered a no-no, and it’s a problem since Kinoma Player 4 EX is a media player and so doesn’t support text.

The solution? Use Yahoo! Pipes or similar “feed remix” tools to create a feed that just contains stuff that Kinoma Player 4 EX can play. Here’s how:

• Go to pipes.yahoo.com and create a pipe
• Add a Sources > Fetch Feed module, and enter the URL to the source feed
• Add an Operators > Filter module, and “permit” the format extensions you want
• Add an Operators > Sort module and sort descending by date
• Connect everything up as shown below

Neat, huh? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — what can you do with Yahoo! Pipes and Kinoma Player?

The famed Comic-Con International — the annual mecca for comic, videogame and movie geeks — just opened their doors to a record-breaking attendance.

The only problem? You’re not there! The show sold out before it started.

Happily, with Kinoma Player 4 EX you’ve got your own personal Comic-Con:

• Entertainment > Comics & Graphic Novels has been loaded with more great podcasts, including the official DC Comics podcast.
• The new Entertainment > Video Games category is all about PC and console video gaming, and features several podcasts each from 1UP and IGN.

You can even get a daily Comic-Con International fix — Entertainment > Comics & Graphic Novels > ComicMix is doing daily podcasts from Comic-Con.

Palm has just released an update for Treo 755p smartphones on Verizon.

No specific improvements are mentioned, but Palm says it “improves the phone application, stability and device usability”. Sounds good to us!

The firmware update will take a good part of an hour. Once it’s complete, follow steps 5-7 of my “grade-and-pave” article to ensure the fastest and most-stable Palm OS experience possible.

• Palm Treo 755p Software Update for Verizon
• The ol’ Palm OS grade-and-pave (or, how to clean your machine)

Last October, I let you in on a little secret — how to get a little-known upgrade discount to Kinoma Player 4 EX by purchasing an upgrade from the Kinoma Media Embedded (KME) that comes with your Centro or Treo.

As of midnight this morning, that discount is gone. Expired. Kaput.

But…if you know friends and family that need Kinoma Player, or if you want to get another copy yourself, here’s how to get Kinoma Player for only $14.95 price until 7/1/2008:

Just go to http://go.kinoma.com/?LastChance with your PC or Mac.

Kinoma Player 4 EX is a great value even at it’s normal price of $24.95, and we have no plans to offer such a huge discount again anytime soon. If you’ve been thinking about buying Kinoma Player, now’s the time.

(Please feel free to send or post the special URL above wherever you like. Note that you don’t need to have a Centro or Treo with KME to take advantage of it.)

Like web browser bookmarks, Kinoma Player bookmarks allow you to keep favorite or frequently-played content close at hand.

You can bookmark URLs to any supported media type, including audio, video, images, playlists, and RSS and OPML feeds.

Creating a bookmark

To create a bookmark when you know the URL, choose Open URL from the Media menu, enter your URL, then click the Bookmark button.

A New Bookmark dialog will appear to allow you to name your bookmark.

You can also create a bookmark while viewing or listening to any internet media item (and most Kinoma Media Guide items) by selecting Add Bookmark from the player menu.

A couple things to remember:

• Kinoma Player isn’t a web browser, so you can’t bookmark web pages. The exception are YouTube  pages to individual videos, since Kinoma Player can determine the URL to a YouTube FLV file from its location.
• Not every Kinoma Media Guide item can be bookmarked, since not all content providers allow this.

Deleting a bookmark

To delete a bookmark, click the “i” icon to the right the bookmark to show the Details dialog and choose Delete.

Deleting all bookmarks

To delete all of your bookmarks at once, you can delete the Kinoma Bookmarks file.