Orb Networks has become the first of several expected companies to announce a collaboration with Kinoma on bringing video streaming to the Palm OS. With Orb that means it is in the process of enabling its popular placeshifting application for Palm's Treo 650 smartphone. Placeshifting enables you to watch and listen to content from your home computer, stereo or television elsewhere than its originally intended place, usually via an Internet connection.

The free Orb software will let Treo 650 users select home or Internet TV, music, or video content of any media format to stream to the Kinoma player from their WindowS XP PC when the next edition of the Kinoma media player is released.

“With Orb on their home PCs and the Kinoma Player on their Palm handsets, the millions of Treo 650 users will be able to play any song from their home music collection whenever the mood strikes them or to watch the crucial moment of a FIFA World Cup match wherever they are," said Ian McCarthy, Orb Networks VP of product marketing, in a statement.

Kinoma announced the intention to ship a Palm OS 5 software product that would allow you to stream media over a Wi-Fi or cellular connection using the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RSTP) last May, and it did a technical proof-of-concept demonstration at the PalmSource Developer Conference with a Treo 650 at that time as well.

Real Time Streaming
RTSP is the streaming media network protocol mandated by the 3GPP cellular phone industry consortium for delivery of streaming audio and video to mobile phones. It is commonly used by Web sites today.

Kinoma VP of business development Mitchell Weinstock told PDAStreet his company's RSTP streamer is like QuickTime Player for the desktop, "where you could - if you had a QuickTime streaming server or a Helix streaming server or any of those servers that use the RSTP protocol - stream either files or do progressive downloads or do live streaming of something like a webcam and be able to receive it with the software and special networking stack that we've provided for the Palm OS 5 device."

RSTP is a really good solution for devices where storage space is limited, such as with a cell phone or smartphone. You play a movie and it's gone. There's no file left to delete, such as what's required with the Treo 650 today.

Over the last several months, Kinoma has worked with content providers and network server companies to validate and make sure the upcoming version of the player works as advertised. "Because this product will function on carrier deck and off carrier deck (off carrier is the wild west), you can click a link and variety of things can go wrong. So it's taking an agonizingly long time to work through all the issues to have as much compatibility as possible before we ship," Weinstock explained.

Weinstock said Kinoma has done enough validation testing with Orb—and is satisfied that the new RSTP-enabled player works very well in the Treo 650 environment—to allow Orb to discuss they're collaboration on this project, although they've been under NDA.

But the company is still guiding the product through an intense period of pre-beta certifications with providers. Weinstock said to us, "We're doing a lot of testing. The testing is going a lot slower than we anticipated because so many people are not following the standards that are published, putting in their own little tweaks and requirements and changes and how they want things done. And we have to continue to modify the player for each of these particular special cases that we come up with in order to have customers avoid running into something that may not work. "

While there may be some streams that don't work when they do ship, Weinstock said the company is going make sure there are plenty that do. In addition to the Orb announcement this week, there will probably be others as the player update moves further along to give people a better idea of the product's capablities.

Multimedia Helper
Kinoma acts as a helper app. So when you click a link in the Treo 650's Blazer browser, for example, the player launches and the video streams to the player. At the conclusion of the clip, Kinoma returns to the page in the browser; just like it would in a typical Web situation on desktop, except that browsers in Palm OS devices don't allow embedded playback.

You see, the aging Palm platform is not multithreading, so you can't have two applications running at the same time; unlike with Windows Mobile and Symbian. As Weinstock said to PDAStreet, "So we're doing the best we can, and designing the best UI possible under the circumstances that we have to work with."

The current version, Kinoma Player 3, isn't bundled with any OEM's. Although earlier versions used to come with devices from Palm OS licensees like Sony and GSPDA products.

"When we get a design win and we're out of the NDA period we'll announce it," he declared.