Kinoma Notes

Mother’s Day is Sun­day, May 11 — that’s less than two weeks from now! Know what you’re get­ting her?

If you’re con­sid­er­ing flow­ers, we’re cur­rently offer­ing a spe­cial that lets you get Kinoma Player for free with the pur­chase of flow­ers from FTD.

How? We’ve part­nered with a com­pany called Tri­al­Pay that lets you try or buy an offer from some of your favorite brands — includ­ing FTD — and in return get Kinoma Player for free.

What’s the catch?

There’s no catch. Com­pa­nies pay Tri­al­Pay to help get them cus­tomers, and in return Tri­al­Pay “pays” you with Kinoma Player 4 EX.

In return for com­plet­ing a Tri­al­Pay offer, you’ll get a real copy of Kinoma Player, com­plete with the excel­lent cus­tomer sup­port that Kinoma is known for.

A post by TreoCentral’s Jay Gross reminded me to note that the qual­i­fy­ing FTD pur­chase includes things like gift bas­kets and choco­lates, too. (Thanks, Jay!)

• Get Kinoma Player free using TrialPay

Sprint TV is a great paid video ser­vice avail­able for Sprint customers.

When you use Sprint TV and choose a pro­gram, Sprint TV launches the phone’s built-in Kinoma Media Embed­ded (KME) to play it.

Nor­mally, when you upgrade to Kinoma Player 4 EX, every­thing that used to play with KME will play with Kinoma Player instead — except Sprint TV. Here’s why:

Sprint TV needs KME to sup­port their streams, includ­ing some spe­cial authen­ti­ca­tion that those streams require. That authen­ti­ca­tion process makes sure (1) that you’re a Sprint cus­tomer, and (2) that you’re cur­rently sub­scribed to Sprint TV or Sprint TV Premiere.

Although we’re not able to add that spe­cial authen­ti­ca­tion to Kinoma Player, we’ve made sure that Kinoma Player is smart enough to use KME auto­mat­i­cally, when­ever necessary.

We’ve had a few cus­tomers ask about Kinoma Player’s Flash Video sup­port. It can be con­fus­ing, so here’s an overview that I hope clears it up for any­body with questions.

Flash Video vs. Flash

It’s impor­tant to dis­tin­guish Flash Video files from generic Flash files.

Generic Flash files can be almost any kind of inter­ac­tive con­tent, from a game to an online word proces­sor. These files use the file exten­sion “swf” and aren’t sup­ported by Kinoma Player. (Gen­er­ally, noth­ing can play these files on mobile devices.)

Kinoma Player sup­ports Flash Video files. These con­tain only video and audio and use the file exten­sion “flv”.

Kinds of FLV files

Kinoma Player sup­ports Flash Video files con­tain­ing Soren­son Spark (a “fla­vor” of H.263, to get tech­ni­cal) and MP3 audio.

This is the “nor­mal” kind of Flash Video file used on YouTube and other video shar­ing sites.

Some Flash Video files use another video for­mat called “VP6”. It offered bet­ter qual­ity but was pro­pri­etary and never got any sig­nif­i­cant trac­tion. Kinoma Player doesn’t sup­port VP6 for those rea­sons, but the good news is that Adobe is now mov­ing away from VP6 in favor of standards-based MPEG-4.

Hap­pily, Google appears to have undone the changes that broke YouTube search in Kinoma Player.

This means that Kinoma Player’s YouTube search is now work­ing great again, and that we will not need to release an update as men­tioned in yesterday’s post.

If YouTube search isn’t work­ing per­fectly for you, please con­tact sup­port to let us know.

Kinoma Player’s built-in YouTube search isn’t work­ing at the moment. The symp­tom is that Kinoma Player will appear to get “stuck” between Con­nect­ing and Pars­ing when doing a YouTube search.

I just wanted to let every­one know that we’re on top of it. We’ve dis­cov­ered that YouTube made some changes that will require an update, and our goal is to make it avail­able for every­one before Thursday.

Stay tuned to Kinoma Notes to be the first to know when the update is available!

Remem­ber, there are three ways to get Kinoma Notes:

• Sub­scribe to the Kinoma Notes feed in your favorite feed reader. (I per­son­ally use Google Reader on my PCs and my phone, but there are lots of excel­lent choices out there.)
• Sub­scribe to Kinoma Notes via email. Every email comes with a one-click unsub­scribe link in case you ever stop lov­ing it.
• Sub­scribe to our Twit­ter feed and get a Kinoma tweet the minute a new post is available.

Note that all other YouTube func­tion­al­ity — includ­ing m.youtube.com play­back and the YouTube feeds in Kinoma Media Guide — con­tinue to work great.