MMPlayer features all of the standard media controls, such as Play, Pause, Stop, etc, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


MMPlayer offers the standard media player controls. Roll over picture for a larger image.

In addition, there's a built-in amplifier and equalizer, brightness and contrast control, and a pan feature for balancing the sound left-to-right.

MMPlayer also lets you insert bookmarks in the movies for saving your place, or noting a particular scene. I have noticed though, that on large files with high bit-rates, the bookmark feature has a tendency to mark the place several minutes forward of where you are. I imagine this has something to do with the caching of the file.

MMPlayer also supports full screen playback, and a rotation feature, letting you rotate the movie to best fit the screen. In addition, there's a zoom function for both windowed display and full screen playback. Figure C shows some screen captures.

FIGURE C


These are actual screen captures from my Tungsten T2. Roll over picture for a larger image.

FIGPAIR D shows captures of the same scenes, but encoded at a higher resolution and quality.

FIGURE D


These are actual screen captures from my Zodiac. Roll over picture for a larger image.

[Editors note: Be aware that some of the choppiness in the colors of the image shown above is not due to the program, but to the fact that we down-sampled the author's JPEG screen captures to GIF images, so things like the light-saber glow will look far better in real life. At some point, we'll update our journal production system to display higher-quality photos, but the loss of quality is definitely not the program's fault.]

Users can customize their MMPlayer with different skins as well. The standard package comes with two skins, the default, and a simpler, subdued one for handhelds with less memory. There are also several other free skins available for download on the company site, along with a skinning kit to create your own skins.

MMPlayer gives you virtually complete control over playback, letting you set the video and audio buffer, with on-screen buffer indicators if you so desire.

Along with all of these other features are performance warnings that pop up to let you know if the buffers are too small, if the resolution is too large, or the bit-rate too high. You can also customize the settings for these warnings by turning them off completely if you like.

The support I got from MMPlayer was top-notch, too. Magnus spent the better part of a day trying to solve a problem I was having with my registration key. Finally, after giving me a logging version of the program to track what was going on, the developer determined that my mail client was cutting off part of the PDB file, rendering the key useless and emailed me a zipped version to solve the problem.

This problem really didn't have much to do with MMPlayer itself, but Magnus still went the whole mile to solve my problem. Top-notch service.

Together we have...
Now you can see that by combining Pocket DVD Studio and MMPlayer, you can take your DVD movies, and other media files, on your handheld wherever you go. These two programs work so well together. It's like they were made for each other.