CorePlayer for S60

[betaboy]

Originally Posted by pseudofinn

I already don't like the additude of this group for several reasons.

1. The state that they "like trends" and so they will call it a 1.1 "Beta". But we still pay $24.95/$29.95 for it? I don't think so.

2. No trial? No thank you. It'd be different if it was a $4.95 or $9.95 program, but it's thirty dollars. Come on.

3. In response to the question, will it support WMA/WMV- the response is that they'll keep us guessing until the release? What kind of additude is this?

No impressed with the software already, and I haven't even tried it. Until I can trial the software, I'm not one bit interested in paying 30 dollars for a Beta program!

lo pseudofinn... let me post comments on your thoughts...

I posted this on our forums... but I though it would deserve a respose here considering your thoughts on CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian.

On 1 and 2.... while we spent the better part of over 2 1/2 years developing CorePlayer / CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian before we released it. We feel that 'Hands down' as far as our platform goes, we are more stable then any media player out there. While we (all of us here at CoreCodec) consider CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian way past any form of 'beta' stage. We recognize that unlike many other software companies, we put the issues out there via forums posts, emails, our KB and support center, in other words we hold nothing back. If its broke we tell you and then we fix it.

Onto the point of 'why' we call it beta on Symbian but not on any of our other platforms.... while all the QA testing in the world can find almost all the issues, we simply recognize that they won't find them all. For each Symbian device type there are so many variables on how the device not only reacts to the firmware but the software thats installed on the device at that time. For those simple facts alone I can tell you we have found a slew of issues alone just in the first 2 days of this initial Symbian release that are related 'directly' to what I just stated and we are now compensating for.

This is really no different then our other mobile platforms (CE, Windows Mobile, Smartphone, Palm)... but in this case we felt it best to put the name 'Beta' on it so we were being upfront with everyone right from the get go (trendy as it is in this web 2.0 era)... and that likely, we will only have a handful of Symbian releases till we launch v1.2 and remove the beta from the name.

On a trial version..... over 10 months ago when we began to offer CorePlayer Mobile. We stated to the community that we would not release a trial on any of our platforms till we felt that the platform was complete. There are many reasonings for this including reaching out to the masses... while for many that is a great thing.... our thought is that we would rather work with the early technology adopters who are the ones that take the software a lil more serious and provide valued feedback. Now, with one last hurdle left before we offer a trial version (the inclusion of our advanced streaming stack), we are close and have planned for it to be added starting with v1.2.x and completing with 1.3.x.

On WMV.... its not in this first release because our QA testing showed the performence of the reference decoder that MS provided to use is slow at best. We are planning to have ours internally developed on added by v1.4 but till then and because the Symbian community is requesting it... we will add that reference decoder till ours is added.

Hardware acceleration... this was something we wanted added for the initial release. But because of the related work on the Symbian Network side that is needed we felt that our devel time was better spent in the platform. We do plan of added GPU in the next couple of releases (N95 users go \0/).

[Homer]

Originally Posted by pseudofinn

Nope. 15 pounds doesn't sound any better to me. I must have missed the joke.

::

Guess it doesn't translate into American too well.

15 quid doesn't sound like a whole lot of money.

Then again it's the equivalent of around 3 gallon of gas over here.

[spyda]

Thanks for the contribution betaboy. You speak of releases v1.2.x and v1.3.x ...eventually even v1.4.x ... do you have any idea of time scales within which these are likelyto be released?

Also, you mention "the inclusion of our advanced streaming stack", can we take this to mean that we will AT LAST have an application we can use to access shared resources on a network and properly stream media files? I certainly hope I have not misunderstood this part of your explanation?

Thanks again.

[betaboy]

While we have not stated this to the public.... we have already begun some of the network stack changes (Aside from the work on Symbian that needs to be done). We already support SMB shares... but not browsing for those shares... try to open.... \\server_name\share_name Again just added.... and not publically known so if it breaks ;-)

[spyda]

Excellent news - although I am unable to get this to work as I am unsure what you mean.

I am familiar with network shares and how it should work but unless there is a connection set up between the phone and the PC with the relevant permissions in place, how can this work?

I realise this is as yet an unsupported feature and not public knowledge so perhaps I am asking too much but a brief explanation would be handy if at all possible.

Thanks.

[sp00k]

Originally Posted by shaffee

Have you tried 640X480 yet in any format? I ask because I like to use the TV out alot...and so far 640X480 in the DivX player doesn't work too well.

Apologies for a very late reply but I've not had time to experiment any more with CorePlayer until now.

It would seem that I did it an injustice when I said in a previous post that: "...it seems that it's quite happy with 320x240 video files, as they get bigger it tends to stutter, stumbling badly over full-size ones, so conversion will still be needed before you can play a DVD-type video... only to be expected though..." This is definitely not the case, it plays 640x480 video quite happily and, moreover, with perfect lip-sync! The reason that I at first thought otherwise was because the larger definition files that I tried it with were recorded off-air, using an Archos and had ADPCM audio... Which it definitely does not like! Once I stream-converted the audio track to MP3, there was no problem.

As yet, it won't handle WMV I'm afraid, although a more efficient WMV codec is a proposed future addition I believe.

It's early days yet in its development and currently its missing some features that hopefully will be added before too long... So far I've only tried it with MPEG-4, AVI and WMV files and as I say, it's played the first two of those types without complaint.

Among the features missing that I'd expected (hoped) to find are:

No bookmarking, either automatic (returns to point it left-off when playing a file), or selective (ability to mark point(s) in a file). Edit: Select 'Keep Playlist' and it WILL remember the point it left off playing at... I live and learn!

No option to overlay either track-progress or time-remaining when playing full-screen.

No 'Delete File' option within the program... This is important to me as most of the audio-recordings that I listen to are radio programs and having heard the recording, I want to erase it to free-up space, without exiting the player.

When playing audio-only, I find the utilisation of the screen area poor, no indication of the volume-setting, for instance, although I assume that the majority of the blank space is reserved for display of embedded album-covers etc... Which I've never bothered with.

One last rather irritating factor is lack of acceleration when fast scanning an audio file, without this it takes quite a while to scan through and find your place in a 1-hour recording! Edit: By increasing the fast fwd & rew steps from a 10 second interval to 1 minute, scanning speed is greatly increased...

I've other niggles but I look forward to updates and corrections to at least some of these omissions in the near future. Meanwhile it does what it's written to do very well... It plays video and audio across a wide variety of formats. The 'bells & whistles' will no doubt come later...

Is it worth the money? To me, yes... And if you need a one-size-fits-all media-player, maybe to you also.

Is it the ultimate media-player? No, not yet... far from it, but it has the potential to be!

[shaffee]

Originally Posted by sp00k

This is definitely not the case[/i], it plays 640x480 video quite happily and, moreover, with perfect lip-sync! The reason that I at first thought otherwise was because the larger definition files that I tried it with were recorded off-air, using an Archos and had ADPCM audio... Which it definitely does not like! Once I stream-converted the audio track to MP3, there was no problem.

Thanks buddy. I think I will give it a try then. Now just wish a bigger battery was available =(

[betaboy]

All N95 users... we have now released CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian 'Beta 2'. I am proud to say that it kicks *** on the N95!! We are still aware of a few issues but this goes along way towards us moving on to add hardware acceleration.

Please try Beta 2 and let me know what you find out!

[betaboy]

Oh... forgot to say... alot of the streaming have been resolved in Beta 2 as well... we are still aware of two more things that needs to be done for beta 3 that are related to streaming. This is also out of scope for the advanced streaming components that are coming between v1.2 and 1.3

[sp00k]

Originally Posted by betaboy

...Please try Beta 2 and let me know what you find out!

Hey Betaboy! An update link would have been good!

EDIT: The bit that Betaboy omitted to mention !!!

"Updates are available from our reseller... www.mobihand.com ,click my account, login, click the CorePlayer purchase and you'll see the updated version."