Conduits released Pocket Player 3 today, the latest iteration of what I think is the best podcast player for Windows Mobile. It’s a heck of an upgrade, and is just about good enough to completely replace the anemic Windows Media Player Mobile on my trusty 6700. But as with so many things, it falls just a few steps shy of true perfection.
Cast of the pod…
Let’s talk about podcasts right up front. Pocket Player has always been good for podcasts (alas, there’s nothing on the Windows Mobile platform that’s quite as good as PTunes on Palm OS actually, Pocket Player is better than PTunes now that a few concerns have been addressed), but this version steps it up. Not only can this browse to podcasts on the device like the previous version, it can browse and stream podcasts live. Enter in the podcast RSS feed, and you can browse all the enclosures listed in that feed. Better still, you can pause and resume the streams if you can’t listen to the entire podcast all in one sitting. No more waiting for podcasts to copy over to the device, no more missing an episode.
Except… The most important podcast feeds I listen to require authentication, as they’re for-pay feeds. It’s just a basic userid and password, probably stored by Internet Explorer as a cookie, but Pocket Player can’t handle authentication feeds. Neither can anything else I’ve found on Windows Mobile (there are a few podcatchers that say they can, but I can’t keep them running long enough to find out before they crash). Sure would be nice if Conduits added authentication.
Update: A representative from Conduits got back to me and sure enough, you can listen to podcasts that require authentication in Pocket Player! The trick is in how you set up the podcast URL. If your podcast requires authentication, try entering the URL like this into Pocket Player:
http://username:password@www.site.com/rss.xml
I have to admit, I’d completely forgotten that way of feeding HTTP authentication to the URL, even though I’ve done with with FTP sites for years. But sure enough, it works. Also, if your username has a space in it, go ahead and leave the space. I know that “breaks” the URL, but it works in Pocket Player. Don’t convert it to a %20. My login for Air America Premium is “Jeff Kirvin” and that’s how I put it into the URL.
Pocket Player also supports video playback now. Don’t delete TCPMP just yet, though. It does video by tying in to the Windows Media Player DLLs and using those for playback decoding. That means it only plays the same formats that Windows Media Player Mobile can play. Yay for WMV and some AVI files, but nay for xvid-encoded DVD rips and the like. Because it’s using the Windows Media code, playback is no more or less smooth than Windows Media Player. Still it’s nice to have one less reason to run WMP.
I haven’t tested this feature yet, but Pocket Player 3.0 is fully uPNP (Universal Plug and Play) compliant, and will be seen by any PC as a standard Windows Media device. This makes syncing playlists and other content from a PC much more automated.
What goes up…
So sounds great, right? Not so fast.
I’ve already talked about the lack of authentication support for podcasts. This won’t affect most people, but for me it cancels out much of the really cool podcast features in 3.0, rendering them moot. But that’s not the only thing I’ve found annoying in my limited testing of Pocket Player 3.0.
They also changed the menu system, adding more features and moving some of the lesser accessed features into sub-menus. No problem, except that one of the things they moved was the Exit command.
Why is that so important? Because in my usage, if I don’t exit Pocket Player explicitly when I’m done listening for a while, it will freeze the next time I try to access it. If I leave Pocket Player paused while I do other things, maybe put the device into suspend for a while, when I turn it back on Pocket Player won’t be in the list of running programs, I won’t be able to switch to it via the recently used applications in the Start menu, and it won’t run again until I soft reset the device. The problem seems to be that Pocket Player crashes when coming out of suspend. I’ve tried this with Pocket Player installed to RAM or on the card, it doesn’t seem to matter. Of course, all my data is on the card, so if this is related to the common Pocket PC problem of the SD slot taking too long to fully initialize, there may be nothing I can do. But the fact is that 3.0 takes at least one more button press to close than 2.8 did.
Update: While Conduits didn’t change the menu system, they did provide a workaround for the bug that made me exit Pocket Player when I’m not using it! In Options, Advanced, make sure your Tag Libary path is in internal memory rather than on the card. This completely did away with the hang I’d been experiencing.
And like 2.8, 3.0 seems to be hit and miss when it comes to auto-resuming content. Sometimes it remembers my place in a two hour podcast, and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t been able to discern a pattern yet that would explain why it sometimes forgets where I was and starts over at the beginning of the ‘cast, but it sure is annoying.
The bottom line…
All said, it’s probably worth picking up Pocket Player 3.0 for most of you. It still has all the nifty plugins and DSPs of the previous version, and the Replay Gain (volume leveling) is supposed to be better now. It’s no less stable than 2.8 and if you don’t listen to podcasts that require authentication, the new podcast browser and stream manager is wonderful.
Update: Conduits is working with me on the bugs mentioned in this article. Watch this space for more updates.
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