Menneisyys

CorePlayer, the long-awaited, commercial successor to the well-known TCPMP, which has (rightfully!) won the Multimedia / Video category of the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Best Software Awards last and, (as far as the unofficial results are concerned) this year, has just been released.



Thanks to BetaBoy, I’ve received a test version so I had the chance to give it a thorough try.

Availability

It’s available here (direct link) and is compatible with WM2003 devices and above. It costs $24.99, but it’s supposed to have a starting rebate too.

Compared to TCPMP, changes on the GUI level

Its GUI is very similar to that of TCPMP, which won’t cause you to have to re-learn everything as can be seen for example here (Settings in main menu), here (file selector) and here (video settings screen - compare this to the screenshots here).

Changes on the engine level

The good

A plethora (and I really mean this! Not even I have had, up to now, the chance to test all of them) of new codecs, which means a lot of new formats to play.

Note that, unfortunately, “exotic” formats like RealOne are (still?) not supported. This isn’t a major problem, however, given that the format of RealOne files are kept in secret very strictly.

Midi support (please see the Midi Bible for more info), as has been promised, is indeed added. I’ve thoroughly tested the midi module, the quality of instruments and found them to be of very good quality. Of course, for example the piano in ultimate.mid (please DO see the just-linked article if you don’t know what I’m referring to) doesn’t sound as excellent as the custom patch set published here. It (the piano) surely exhibits some compression / downsampling effects. This is pretty understandable, given that the application only takes some 1.3 Mbytes storage memory, of which, at most, some hundred kilobytes may be taken by the instrument samples. Other than that, I have no complaints with the Midi quality at all - it sounds MUCH better than HTC's own midi library coming with all PPC Phone Edition devices.

The bad

Currently, it has no AVRCP support at all – not only under WM5, but also under WM2003SE. TCPMP supports the latter – CorePlayer doesn’t. Hope this will be fixed really soon (along with, preferably, adding AVRCP support for WM5 too). (Note that you’ll see opinions CorePlayer supports AVRCP if you install additional, operating system-level software. This is not really the case.)

Also, it seems it’s not possible to use “old” TCPMP codecs. For example, CorePlayer doesn’t support Speex files (see the Sound Recording Bible for more info on this format) by default. By installing the “old”, TCPMP-specific Speex codec, this problem hasn’t gone away (unlike with TCPMP, of course).

Verdict

Go for this app if you’re serious multimedia user. This application (and its author) certainly deserves paying for and I don’t think the above-mentioned problems (which will only affect few people – for example, only those with Bluetooth stereo headphones) will be only fixed in the distant future.

In the future, I may elaborate on the new video codecs a bit more.

Recommended links

Just Another Mobile Monday’s great review

The AximSite thread

__________________
MS MVP- Mobile Devices.

buckyg

1.01 is out for WM! Was looking around on Mobihand for something else, checked out of curiousity. Haven't seen mention of the WM release yet on Corecodec. It says 1.01 on Mobihand but About says 1.02. I did have to enter my Core Number (serial #)again.

Settings are there! Nice having File Associations, MicroDrive & Equalizer settings. :approve:

No real chance to play much with it more than that, yet.

Kulnet

Awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

__________________
Paul

buckyg

Elsewhere, people are asking, so I will post it here also: I got it from Mobihand. Logged into my account, then downloaded it from my purchase history.

Oh yeah, officially per CoreCodec, it is 1.02. Must be a typo on Mobihand.