Smartphone Video Playback

Date April 10, 2006

A couple of entries back, I was telling you about the frustrations I was having getting my SPV C600 Smartphone to play full screen video in Media Player.

 

Well, I’ve managed to get it working. It needed a custom app from the developers at Orange to unlock the security on my phone before I could update the registry key in question, but once installed, I was then able to use Mobile Registry Editor from Breaksoft to update the registry.

 

The FAQ pages at Breaksoft describe how to get your Orange phone unlocked if you’re having the same kind of problems that I encountered. Looking at the posts there, I think I was unlucky at having to jump through the extra hoops of contacting my airtime provider’s customer care centre.

 

Assuming you’ve unlocked your device, here’s a summary of this post from spv-developers.com, which describes what you need to do to get full screen video working:

  • Download MobileRegistryEditor from Breaksoft, and unzip the files to your local computer.
  • Connect your device via Activesync, and copy WMSyncCaps.xml from the Windows folder on your device to your computer
  • Edit that file, changing the Height and Width values to 220 and 340, respectively (that’s for an SPV C600 viewed in landscape – the screen on your device might be a different size).
  • Save the file as, say, WMSyncCaps2.xml and copy back to the Windows folder on your device

  • Open MobileRegistryEditor and navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WMDM

  • Edit the WMCapabilities key, replace the value with Windows\WMSyncCaps2.xml
  • Copy WMPInfo.xml from the storage card on your device to your local computer – this is just for backup. I’m assuming you’ll be storing your media on a storage card since the native storage capacity of most Smartphone devices is so pitiful.
  • Delete WMPInfo.xml from your storage card.
  • Disconnect your device from Activesync and reboot it.
  • Open Media Player on your computer, and select Tools, Options, Devices. Click the Advanced button and then hit the Delete Files button.
  • Restart Media Player, restart your phone and connect it to your computer.
  • When the phone has established a connection, go into the Sync tab on Media Player – you’ll need to redefine which playlists get synchronised with your device now

Once synchronised, start Media Player on your device, select a video clip and hit the 0 key to switch into full screen mode. With the quality and brightness of the QVGA screen - especially on the SPV C600 - I’m surprised that this isn’t the default configuration. Anyway, enjoy!

Category Posted in media, smartphone

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