Best (free) Pocket PC media player even lets you watch otherwise (almost) inaccessible Web videos

http://discussion.brighthand.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=781991

You may already know that, particularly if you associate The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) with the given multimedia (MM for short) type and just click a link on a Web page that directly points to a MM file (AVI, MP3, anything), then, after the download, TCPMP will start playing it immediately. Unfortunately, not all pages link their MM content directly. For example, "professional" (as opposed to most simple(r) and/or "enthusiast") ones that offer QuickTime (QT) contents, generally, don't. They only have the MM content as attributes passed to the QT plug-in. This is why you can't just make them be played on the Pocket PC without an extensive HTML scrutinization (see Appendix for an example on this). TCPMP is not only the best media player for the Pocket PC but also has HTML parsing capabilities, which makes it much-much easier, even for complete outsiders, to watch "embedded", otherwise not accessible videos. I've set up a demo page to demonstrate all this to http://www.winmobiletech.com/sekalaiset/DirectTestVide0s.html. It links three DivX AVI and one QT MOV files and also contains an embedded QT file. To be able to see the latter, you have to run circles to be able to extract the address of the QT file – you have to examine the source. If it's not compressed, that is – please read this thread on what problems may be involved in this. (Incidentally, before you ask: yes, as can clearly be seen, it was also me that have solved the GZIP problem that had previously made the life of PPC users wanting to have access to the HTML sources much harder for 5 years...) on your PDA, extract the URL's and directly paste them into TCPMP or download the files first in PIE and open the local files from TCPMP. Otherwise, all you'll see will be the following (using PIE, on WM2003SE+ devices, after the usual "Press OK to continue loading the content of this page" message I've explained here): click for screenshot while the destop browser, a QT plug-in existing for the platform, will play the online video without problems: click for screenshot TCPMP for the resuce! Go to File/Open file and paste the address containing the embedded videos in the text input field. After the HTML downloading and parsing, URL's of even the embedded videos (here, king_kong-tlr_h.320.mov), in addition to all the directly linked ones, will be displayed: click for screenshot Do you see the second one, king_kong-tlr_h.320.mov? Yes, TCPMP has found the embedded QT file! Now, just click it to play. See how much easier it is this way to watch videos from the Web than with manually extracting URL's? Please note that the HTML parser is far from perfect. It's able to extract URL's from the majority of the pages. With exactly the same page as above, just after moving the embedded <OBJECT> tag to the bottom of the page, it won't find its contents any more. You may want to give this a try; here's the page: http://www.winmobiletech.com/sekalaiset/DirectTestVide0sUnparsable.html: click for screenshot Other remarks Incidentally, TCPMP, as of version 0.70, isn't able to register itself in the Registry as a QuickTime-compliant player (that is, a player associated with .mov files), so, if you want to be able to directly invoke TCPMP on directly linked MOV files, you'll need to do some additional work. You'll need to import the following registry import file (please read my registry editor roundup if unsure about this) to be able to directly invoke TCPMP by clicking a directly linked QT (.mov) file: [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov] @="MOVFile" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MOVFile] @="QuickTime File" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MOVFile\Shell\Open\Command] @="\"\\LOOXStore\\TCPMP The Core Pocket Media Player\\player.exe\" \"%1\"" (Note that you'll need to change \\LOOXStore\\TCPMP The Core Pocket Media Player to the actual path of TCPMP's player.exe on your PDA.) Also make sure you read my previous, TCPMP-related blog entry (if not the entire blog – it's certainly worth it). Appendix Here's the <OBJECT> tag of the above test HTML (I've copied it from here, where there was a lot of other, additional stuff in the file): <TD><OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="152" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0"> <PARAM NAME="controller" VALUE="TRUE"> <PARAM NAME="type" VALUE="video/quicktime"> <PARAM NAME="autoplay" VALUE="true"> <PARAM NAME="target" VALUE="myself"> <PARAM NAME="src" VALUE="http://movies.apple.com/movies/universal/king_kong/king_kong-tlr_h.320.mov"> <PARAM NAME="pluginspage" VALUE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/index.html"> <EMBED WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="152" CONTROLLER="TRUE" TARGET="myself" SRC="http://movies.apple.com/movies/universal/king_kong/king_kong-tlr_h.320.mov" type="video/quicktime" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/index.html"></EMBED> </OBJECT></TD> It can be almost impossible for anyone not (very well) versed in HTML to find the URL in here (emphasized with bold). (Please note that I had to change o to 0 (zero) in all words' video' inside URL's for some reason I don't have time to find out now. I'm not a 1337 (leet, elite; people that like using 1337 alphabet) at all - I just had to quickly (I've spent some 20-25 minutes on finding out what caused the rejected messages...) find a way to come up with an article that has URL's the blog engine accepts, this is why I've decided to change the words 'video' this way. Sorry for the confusion and the resulting, slightly different URL's in the screenshots.)