The Palm OS is in dire need of an update, but that doesn't mean you can't use your Treo as a portable media player. The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP), originally written by Gabor Kovacs, is an open-source, platform-agnostic video player for smartphones. By downloading and installing TCPMP and the correct plug-ins, you'll be able to play dozens of media formats, including DivX, XviD, FLAC, H.264, Vorbis, WAV, AVI, AC3, MPEG-1, MP2, and MP3. It also supports "container" formats, such as AVI, ASF, OGG, and even QuickTime. The program is good enough to be built into Palm OS, though some persistent audio issues somewhat soured me on the player.

I reviewed the Palm OS version on a Treo 700p and grabbed version 0.71 of the app from the company website. There's a newer release candidate called 0.72RC1, but it ran sluggishly on the same Treo. Video played smoothly, but audio fell out of sync with video by several seconds on all the files I tried. There are also versions for Symbian and Pocket PC floating around, though those platforms already come with useful media players built in.

When I installed TCPMP, I added several of the plug-ins; this way I could try MPEG, AVI, and some audio formats. (Check the included install.htm file for explanations of which plug-ins are necessary for which formats.) The installation was as simple as unpacking the PRC file and the desired plug-ins, and then adding them all to your next PalmOne Quick Install in a single pass.

TCPMP certainly doesn't look the part. Resembling a black-and-white Macintosh app from the late 1980s, it has absolutely no eye candy whatsoever. You can't just open a single file, either. You have to place a check mark in the appropriate box—or multiple boxes, if you want to queue up several—click OK at the bottom, and then click Play. That's a useful feature, but clearly no one paid attention to standard interface conventions.

I threw lots of video files at it in MPG, AVI, and ASF formats with no problems, at least visually, aside from the occasional frame-rate stutter. Most of the time, videos looked perfect. Impressively, TCPMP automatically scales videos to fit the device's display. There's no need to transcode videos that are, say, 480-by-208, or even 640-by-344, down to a width of 320 pixels, though the player appeared to struggle a bit with these larger files, reacting more slowly to my input.

Sound quality was quite good, too, with excellent stereo separation, even with the Treo's included earbuds. Audio synchronization was more problematic, however. It was nowhere near the problems I mentioned above with version 0.72RC1, at least on this particular Treo. But some videos (usually MPEG) had tight audio sync, and others (some AVI, as well as the larger ones that TCPMP had to scale down) were processor-intensive enough to throw off the audio by almost one second, which is noticeable.

On the plus side, TCPMP offers lots of tunable preferences, including playback speed, audio/video offset (which helped with some but not all audio-sync issues), various scaling options to fit the Treo's 320- by 320-pixel screen, and adjustments for brightness, contrast, and color saturation. I could usually, but not always, end up with something watchable by fiddling with the audio settings.

TCPMP is a solid piece of software, but it has an uncertain future. There's no official home page for the TCPMP project anymore, since http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about/ (cited in the player's Wikipedia entry) is now gone. CoreCodec took over development and is now marketing a commercial version called CorePlayer. That product has a jazzier interface, but it costs $19.95 and there's no trial version available. You're on your own as to whether this software will run well on your particular handheld; I found numerous reports around the Web that claimed it doesn't perform as well as TCPMP. Meanwhile, CoreCodec also announced a new, free version called BetaPlayer, but it's not available yet; in fact, all of the pages at www.betaplayer.com were blank.

Despite its confusing pedigree and audio issues, I still recommend the current, free TCPMP 0.71 to Palm OS Treo owners. It's a useful way to get your media fix on the go, virtually irrespective of the kind of files you want to play.

Download the Core Pocket Media Player at the company's website

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