Commercial software is not always better than free open source alternatives. In the case of The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) which became the commercially available Core Player, the older open source player still gets heavy use – and here’s yet another great use for it. According to WMExperts, there is now a Flash plug-in which allows for TCPMP to play FLV files directly on the PPC. This allows for the playing of playing YouTube movies! Sadly, Core Player will probably never get this added in. So keep your TCPMP around and you’ll have the best of all worlds.

Download the Flash Video plug-in.

It is designed for Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 and higher. It has two parts: 1. A program to download YouTube movie by PPC. 2. A TCPMP plugin to play flv file directly on PPC (the plugin will never support CorePlayer)

Read past the jump for detailed instructions on installing.

Inside the downloaded archive of tcpmpflvplugin-v0.2.zip you will see 4 files. YouTubeDownload-x86.exe is a Windows program for your desktop computer. So copy that over to your desktop or another place you wish. This program will allow you to download the FLV’s off of YouTube. We’ll run through downloading videos first before going to the PDA portion of the instructions. To do this, you run the program which gives you this screen:

I clicked the "…" button and selected desktop for my location to save the video. Video ID is the YouTube video ID. This can be found in the web browser URL of the YouTube video you are watching:

So in this case, my video ID is "d1Px-jPm_TU". Put that in the box above and click start to begin downloading (again in my case I selected the destination to the desktop.

Alright! Now we have a video we can watch. Let’s go and install the TCMP plug-in and load the video onto the device. First make sure you have TCPMP installed. If you don’t go download and install it – use the ActiveSync version to make things easier.

Download TCPMP: Smartphone | Pocket PC

Now, let’s go ahead and copy over the other 3 files we saw earlier in the ZIP archive to /Program Files/TCPMP

Those files again are:

- flvffmpeg.plg
- flvsplitter.plg
- YouTubeDownload.exe

Great! If you are missing files or have more files than what’s pictured here, don’t worry about it as some may have different plugins installed (as you can see there’s an FLV..I tried this earlier and copied a YouTube FLV here).

That’s all there is to install. Now you can copy your YouTube video to where you want whether it be in the main memory or an expansion card that’s in your PDA. By default this video file is called by youtubeid.flv…so in our example the default name is d1Px-jPm_TU.flv. This can be renamed to anything you want.

And you can run TCPMP and open it!

Technorati Tags: TCPMP, The Core Pocket Media Player, Flash, FLV, YouTube, Video, CODEC,  Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, WM, Just Another Mobile Monday

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