One of the things that always zaps people at my talks about mobile computing is my demonstration of running full-length videos (movies, TV episodes, etc.) on my Palm TX PDA, without skipping, without stuttering audio, in a limited RAM environment, on a slow processor.

And the most common question I get after my talks -”Can you give me a copy of that application you are running?”

This question invariably blows me away, because people always assume that they have to pirate software to get good stuff.

The application I run on my PDA is an opensourced application called “The Complete Personal Media Player”, aka TCPMP. It can play virtually any video format you can throw at it, including MPEG, DivX, AVI, ASF, OGG, etc. You can get it from here. (Note that I am, at this time, using a beta version, that you can download from here).

It can also play just about music file format you can throw at it

TCPMP is designed to run on PalmOS, PocketPC and Windows. The source code is available, in case anyone wants to try his/her hand at porting it to another platform – and I am keen to see someone port this to the Simputer. (Anyone interested? I can make resources available)

I usually carry 3-4 movies (or Startrek episodes) on my PDA, which comes in very useful when stuck at airports, being driven across town by car, circling Mumbai airport for an hour or more waiting for the congestion to ease, or during boring talks. I just need to plug in earphones, fire up TCPMP, select the movie I am interested in, and I am on. And I can stop and continue at any time.