Kinoma Notes

Since the launch of the original Kinoma Player in 2002, Kinoma has led the way in mobile media technology. The platform first established in Kinoma Player lives on not only in Kinoma’s flagship product — Kinoma Play — but also in products from companies including Sony and Sling Media.

As Palm OS fades into the sunset, we’ve had a lot of folks ask what our plans are. Today we’re announcing that we’ll be ending sales and support for Palm OS products in order to focus completely on current phone OSs.

If you’re a Palm OS user, here’s what you need to know: Kinoma will be ending sales of Kinoma Player 4 EX on 8/1/2010. We’ll continue to offer support, including any necessary security and critical fixes, until 10/1/2010. Effective 10/1/2010, Kinoma will offer only community-based support Kinoma Player 4 EX via our forum at forum.kinoma.com.

We’re also ending sales and support for Kinoma Producer for Windows and Mac OS on the same schedule.

We’d like to thank everyone who’s supported these products, and helped pioneer the now-common sight of people enjoying music, movies, podcasts and audiobooks on phones. You were ahead of your time, and when you upgrade your phone we hope you’ll choose Kinoma Play.

This update is free for Kinoma Producer 4 customers. If you don’t yet have Kinoma Producer, you can buy it here or get a free trial here.

How to update

Use the “Lost Key” form to request an email with a download link to all of your Kinoma Products, including Kinoma Producer 4 if you’ve purchased a copy.

Fixes and improvements

• Added Palm Centro and Palm Treo 755p to presets list.

• Improved compatibility with latest QuickTime updates.

• Fixed minor cosmetic issues on Windows Vista.

Back in August I mentioned that Kinoma was honored to have all of our products nominated for the 2007 Mobile Star Awards. The Mobile Star Awards are Mobile Village’s yearly awards for the best mobile products and solutions.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Kinoma Player 4 EX and Kinoma Producer 4 both won in the Consumer Mobile Media Utility category!

• Kinoma Player 4 EX won the Gold Star
• Kinoma Producer 4 won the Silver Star

To our customers who voted for our products, we really appreciate that you took the time — thank you!

• 2007 Mobile Star Award winners

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.

Wow! This week we were lucky enough to get two terrific reviews from folks who spent some quality time with both of our products.

Harv Laser, a Managing Editor for TreoCentral, is the very definition of enthusiast. We really like when he writes about our products because he often goes beyond the basics to describe not just the “what” but also the “why”, and that makes them useful reading for future and current customers alike.

His new review is for Kinoma Producer 4. As Harv says:

…Kinoma makes another superb, consumer-oriented, inexpensive product that gets little attention, and I think it’s long-overdue for a review.

Kinoma Producer is a great companion to Kinoma Player — not to mention your iPod, PSP, Zune, etc. — and we’re glad to see it get an in-depth review.

• Kinoma Producer 4 review, Part I [TreoCentral]
• Kinoma Producer 4 review, Part II [TreoCentral]