MMPlayer: A Mobile Media Player
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1. What are the hardware requirements to run MMPlayer?
Our goal is to have MMPlayer run on all PalmOS 5 devices. For the moment, MMPlayer has been successfully tested on the following handhelds:

  • Palm Tungsten|T
  • Palm Tungsten|T2
  • Palm Tungsten|T3
  • Palm Tungsten|T5
  • Palm Tungsten|C
  • Palm Tungsten|E
  • Palm Tungsten|E2
  • Palm Zire 31
  • Palm Zire 71
  • Palm Zire 72
  • Palm Treo 600
  • Palm Treo 650
  • Palm LifeDrive
  • Garmin iQue 3600
  • Sony UX-40/50
  • Sony Clie TG/NX/NZ (Versions before 0.2.10 are limited to 8kHz mono audio. And version 0.2.12 and after must use MCA2, see the manual for more info.)
  • TapWave Zodiac 1/2
    • 2. What's the limitations of MMPlayer in trialware mode?
    An unregistered copy of MMPlayer will display a text asking you to register after about 1 minute of playing a file. It will also start to decrease the volume (and contrast if playing video). However, the text can not be displayed if the MMFont.pdb file has not been installed.
    3. I don't have a memory card. Can I use MMPlayer anyway?
    Yes! However, the internal memory of Palm devices can only store PDB files. So, in order to store a file in internal memory, you need to convert the media file to such a PDB file. The conversion can be done using the par utility available here. Precompiled versions can be downloaded here for windows and linux.

    Then type the following command: (in a DOS-window and with par in the path)

    par c -a stream song.pdb "name of the song.mp3" MMPA MMPL song.mp3

    (If your media file is some other type than mp3, then you should of course use that file extension instead of mp3 in the command above. The file extension is important, because MMPlayer sometimes need it to determine the format of the file.)

    Then install the PDB file to the Palm using HotSync with the Palm Desktop. MMPlayer will then be able to use the PDB file as a media source.

    4. MMPlayer complains about "MMPlayer library not found".
    You can't install MMPlayer on a memory card. If you do, the GUI won't be able to find the library which is used when playing in the background. MMPlayer doesn't support being launched from memory card yet, although some are able to do it using 3rd party launchers.
    5. What does it mean to have items like ext:1/AUDIO/song.mp3 in the playlist?
    The playlist contains URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that are used to locate media streams. The first part of the URL specifies which protocol is to be used when reading the media stream. Some of the protocols that are/will be supported by MMPlayer are 'ext' (used to read data from an extension card), 'int' (used to read data from RAM), 'http'/'rtsp' (used to read data from the Internet).

    For the 'ext' protocol, the number that follows is the volume identifier for the memory card where the file was when it was selected. Palm OS gives each inserted card a unique volume identifier, so if you remove/insert a card, its volume identifier will change.

    6. How do I transfer media files to my memory card?
    There are quite a few ways to do this, here's some:

  • Use a card reader. This is actually the only long-term solution. They are not expensive and the prospect of transferring a 100-200MB movie to a card using one of the methods below is not very appealing. With Card Export and Pilot Install, expect transfer rates around 30-100kB/s, with the standard install tool even lower. So, a 100MB file would take 20-60 minutes to transfer instead of 2-3 minutes with a slow card reader, and even faster with a fast one.

  • Use Card Export. Card Export is a commersial alternative and requires Windows 2000/XP. It can be used to mount the memory card as a disk under windows. When installed and started, simply drag and drop files to the card.

  • Use Pilot Install. Pilot install is free for non-commersial use and lets you install files to your Palm's memory or to the memory card without having to complete the whole hotsync procedure.

  • Use the standard Palm Desktop install tool. Start the install tool and drop the files you want to install in its window. Different types of files will be copied to different directories on the card depending on the current file type mapping of the Palm. Some programs change this mapping to make certain file types end up in certain directories. As a general rule of thumb however, audio files are copied into /AUDIO and images and videos are copied into /DCIM. However, the standard Install tool can be really slow and it sometimes has problems copying large files, so since video files are known to be large, I'd suggest another alternative if you run into trouble.

    • 7. Will MMPlayer be optimized for the hardware decoder chip in the Tapwave Zodiac?
    Sure, if Tapwave releases information about how to use the chip. The currently released SDK only includes high-level calls to manipulate graphics, it does not include any of the media decoding primitives we could use to speed up mpeg decoding. There's also a HDK (Hardware Development Kit) available, but that only describes the physical characteristics of the device and is only usable for hardware developers.
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