Ever wanted to play your RMVB videos without converting them? Now, you’re taken a little bit closer to the solution – a RVMB plug-in has just been released for Windows Media Player Mobile, which makes it possible to play RMVB videos on Windows Mobile devices.

No, don’t think everything is OK now. The plug-in, while it’s indeed compatible with RMVB videos, won’t play back the currently available, high(er)-res videos without severe slowdowns. As it’s only “old” RM videos that are, generally, encoded at low (say, QVGA at max) resolutions and RMVB files are, generally, encoded with the width of at least 576 pixels, you will encounter very choppy (2…5 fps even on the fastest devices) playback. Therefore, you might want to forget playing back this format entirely and transcode them into either MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX / XviD) or, if your handset is powerful enough, MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264 / AVC) for seamless playback in either TCPMP or CorePlayer. Please see THIS for more info on these target formats and THIS for more info on RMVB-compliant transcoder tools.

Furthermore, it only runs on devices using the Intel Xscale PXA-27x CPU’s. This itself rules out most of current models based on other CPU’s like the TI OMAP (I’ve tested the plug-in on my HTC Wizard; it exits at once upon activation), Qualcomm 7200 (HTC Kaiser, Touch Dual etc.) or Samsung (Trinity etc.). That is, you can only run it on some scarce or somewhat outdated models like the HTC Athena (x7500), the HTC Universal, the Dell Axim x50/x51 series, the previous-generation HP iPAQ’s etc.

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