What good is a high-quality color screen if you cannot watch movies on it? That is what theKompany said about the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, and Larry Garfield takes a look at their answer; tkcVideo.
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It never fails. As soon as you have a handheld with a color screen, people want to watch movies on a three-inch display. Sometimes that means blockbuster extravaganzas squeezed really small, other times it means short training videos. Either way, the most tightly-compressed video format currently is the MPEG-4-based DivX ;-) codec (not to be confused with the failed self-destructing DVD format of the same name that died a few years ago). theKompany's simple but effective tkcVideo brings DivX movies to the Zaurus.
 | tkcVideo shows movies in this shrunken mode or in full screen rotated mode
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tkcVideo comes as two components. The first is a common theKompany library, at 431 KB, used by all theKompany applications, and the other is the tkcVideo viewer itself, measuring 388 KB. The viewer installs to a new tab in the launcher named "tkeKompany.com" rather than to one of the existing tabs. Fortunately, it can easily be moved by the optional Tab Manager applet available in the main ZaurusZone package feed.
The Video Player itself is a simple one-screen app. The main screen is a straight list of movies on the device that the program knows about, either in RAM or on the CF card. Because the driver for the SD slot on the Zaurus is rather limited, being closed-source, the SD card is not fast enough to support video files. There is also a file selector to select a video file anywhere on the device and play it as well as adding it to the list.
Selecting any movie and tapping the play button on the top of the display causes the movie list to shrink and the top half of the display to become the video viewing area. The default viewing mode for tkcVideo is to shrink the image and display it across the screen width-wise. A set of play controls including fast forward and rewind sit above the video screen, while a slider below it provides seek functionality. Tapping the display cycles through the play modes, rotating the image and toggling full screen mode. A toggle button in the top right also toggles full screen mode. When in full screen, the image is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, so that when viewed properly the keyboard end of the device points left. In all views, the dot-button in the D-Pad on the device will pause and unpause the video, left with rewind the movie a few seconds, and right will advance it a few seconds. Unfortunately, the controls do not rotate with the image.
Image quality was very good, and audio synchronization was clean and crisp, provided of course that the original movie file is of good quality. tkcVideo supports full stereo audio via the Zaurus' headphone jack. However, the program will only show the top-left 240x320 pixels of any video file. Playing a file that is larger than that size will result in the rest of the image being cropped. tkcVideo does not include a program for making DivX video files, but the theKompany web site includes a brief tutorial on how to get started with other tools.
Overall, tkcVideo does a simple job and does it well. There are a few problems, most notably when tapping on the video to rotate or resize the image predicting we were not able to determine exactly in what order the different displays would appear. Still, for those looking for a solid movie playing experience on the Zaurus tkcVideo is worth investigating.
tkcVideo is available now from the theKompany web site for $19.95 USD.
- What's positive: simple interface, good playback quality
- What's negative: A few UI problems
Overall: 
Price and availability
The will start selling for TBA () in December 1969.
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