TCPMP

WM 6.0 Direct Download (Download Page)

WM 6.1 Direct Download

For the past couple week’s I’ve been trying to do my part and take mass transit to work. Its only a 15 minute ride on the bus, which happens to the perfect about of time to toss on some tunes, check my favorite RSS feeds and respond to e-mails. The first couple of days I used Windows Media Player 10 Mobile for mp3 play back, but soon got annoyed at the controls, and song/album selection. I finally caved and dug up the CAB file for TCPMP (I was holding out until the BetaPlayer is released) and I was very pleasantly surprised.

TCPMP’s interface doesn’t look as slick as Windows Media Player, but I love all the features and extended functionality.

Pros

• Easy selection of files in the file system for playback. Select entire folders or individual files for playback.
• Easily create/save/manage play lists on the fly by selecting individual/groups of files from the file system.
• Doesn’t rely on ID3 tags (Unlike Windows Media Player’s library which lists by file meta-data ie. Artist, Album, Genre, etc.)
• Easy to track/scrub through a song.
• Plays a boat-load of media formats, including DivX. This makes it great for playing your movies/tv shows that are encoded with non-Microsoft codecs (aka pretty much everything oput there)
• Handles album artwork.
• Can create shortcuts for almost everything in the “Settings” menu
• Tons (and I mean A LOT) settings that allow tweaking audio and video playback.

Cons

• Interface could be more polished/slick.
• Music playback sometimes stutters when I’m running a couple apps and typing a text message (this is due to lack of resources).
• Doesn’t automatically mute for the duration of the phone call. It will must when you get the call, but when you answer the call it will resume playing — strange behavior.
• Not skin-able?

There are also additional playback plug-ins available at bottom of the TCPMP Download Page that allow you to play FLAC, AC3, FFMPEG, VORIS, and other file formats.

Depending on the size/quality of your videos you may have to decrease the Video quality to “Low” or “Lowest” .. this shouldn’t make much of a perceivable drop in video quality (the Blackjack 2’s screen is so small that any decrease in “source” quality is washed out by the small resolution) , but the playback will be much smoother. I had to do this for my Flight of the Conchord’s clip (as seen above in the screenshot) which was 240MB for a 26 min file @ 624×352 .. I think videos that have a native resoluton of 320×240 will play back without issue but I have yet to test this theory.