Palo Alto, Calif.-based Kinoma Inc. on Thursday released Kinoma Player 3 EX, the latest version of their multimedia player software for Palm OS 5-based handhelds. The new version of the software now plays back MPEG-4 video, AAC audio and displays JPEG images. It can work in conjunction with Kinoma Producer 3, an application that works on Mac OS X and Windows-based PCs.
AAC is the same audio codec Apple makes available in iTunes, though Kinoma cautions that audio files purchased through the iTunes Music Store won’t play, as they’re protected with FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Still, iTunes users who have encoded their own unprotected music using AAC can transfer the files to their Palm PDA and play them back using this application. And with MPEG-4 support, users can view up to seven hours of video on 1GB video card, according to Kinoma. Kinoma offers a free version of Kinoma Player 3 for download from its Web site, but the EX version — with support for MPEG-4 and AAC — costs US$19.99.
In conjunction with Kinoma Player 3 EX’s release the developer has also released Kinoma Producer 3. Kinoma Producer 3 lets Mac and Windows users compress video to a size and format that can be installed on their Palm OS 5-based handheld. It takes unprotected MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, WMA, QuickTime, AVI, DV, DivX, WAV, AIFF and MP3 formats and compresses them to MPEG-4 files. Kinoma Producer 3 costs US$29.95.