GREAT NEWS: Top Linux Multimedia Player MPlayer Now on Windows Mobile

MPlayer is one of the most popular Linux/Unix media player … we all know that, don’t we. Now, thanks to XDA-Developers forum member amitv_17, the porting to Windows Mobile has started.

It’s available HERE, in the official XDA-Devs thread and is, of course, a free download. It seems to be compatible with most WM5 and WM6 Pocket PC’s and Smartphones. For now at least it seems it’s incompatible with pre-WM5 operating systems .

The goods:

1. a HUGE arsenal of codecs and communications protocols already available; in this respect, it’s even better than CorePlayer (which, as of now, doesn’t support RTSP, albeit it will really soon be added)!
2. supports even RealAudio / RealVideo, unlike CorePlayer / TCPMP / ANY other Windows Mobile player (Note that the CoreCodec folks have announced (before the port of MPlayer) that they would never add RealOne support to CorePlayer because it’s a proprietary format).
3. alternative HTTP tunneling with RTSP; working just GREAT with RealAudio streams! In this respect, it’s even better than RealPlayer on Symbian S60v3 FP1 (for example, the one that comes with the Nokia N95), because not even the latter supports HTTP RealOne audio/video streaming, “only” for MPEG4 video streaming (unlike HTC’s own and, in this respect, really incapable Streaming Media on Windows Mobile)
4. supports real (UDP-based) RTSP, which means better bandwidth utilization than with HTTP tunneling. Of course, it also means you must have direct access or a capable Wi-Fi network. This will only later be added to CorePlayer.
5. supports both (most) Pocket PC and MS Smartphone models (unfortunately, WM5+ only)

Given that it’s the first version, pretty much promising.

The bads (for now):

1. HUGE CPU usage when playing back streamed audio! This means it’ll chew through your battery very fast .
2. bad MP3 playback, very sensitive to CPU usage peaks
3. no WMA support (better to have one since this is Windows Mobile platform after all)
4. very-very rudimentary interface
5. problems with streaming MPEG4 videos
6. local (as opposed to streamed) MPEG4 videos do work. They are, however, very choppily played back; CPU usage is pretty bad, too.

So for the mean time the verdict is that it’s certainly nice to welcome Mplayer on Windows Mobile. It’s a far cry away from established media players, particularly video playback-wise, typically considering the raw CPU performance I can get from my TI OMAP 200Mhz (even when o/c to 260-273%) [HTC Artemis] when decoding. For now though I am sticking with TCPMP/Core Player.

Download armv4 version of Mplayer this should run on all devices

Download armv5te version of Mplayer this should run on all omap850+ devices

All-in-all, this is GREAT news and is definitely something to keep an eye on!

BTW, out of curiousity, how many of you use Windows Mobile – PDA’s and/or phones. If not, then which mobile are you using?