PodTrapper Media Issues

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Background

All media played back on the device must use the built in media player (on Android this is not 100% true, but for PodTrapper right now it is). As a result, PodTrapper is limited to playing back only what your device is capable of playing using the native media player.

BlackBerry GSM and CDMA Phones are completely different

For BlackBerry devices it turns out that the simulator, GSM devices and CDMA devices (Verizon, Sprint) all implement different ways of playing back media. The simulator, for example, uses Windows' built in media player to play back media, which means it can generally play everything, and it's not indicative of what's possible on the device.

The GSM devices implement a media player controlled by RIM (or contracted out, not sure there), but they generally control aspects of it. As far as devices go, it sounded like these are the most reliable for media.

CDMA devices, on the other hand, are all handled by the built in Qualcomm chipset inside the device. Apparently these devices can be pretty flaky, and are where you'll usually see the most issues (skipping to the end, seek problems, etc). Upgrades to these rely on chipset updates supplied by Qualcomm to RIM, and then being incorporated into an OS.

What to do if you see a problem with particular media

First, try to play that media in the native player (via the 'Play in Native Player' menu item) and see if you can duplicate the behavior. If so it means you've run in to an OS issue, and I likely won't be able to fix it in PodTrapper (though in some cases I can work around it). If you can't duplicate in the native player, though, definitely let me know.

As it stands, duplicating an issue with media generally requires having a copy of the exact media causing the problem and playing it on the exact device and OS version experiencing the problem. Unfortunately I don't have many devices here so that means I'm not very helpful with regard to this. But, if you can send me the media file and give me the info on what phone and OS you're running, I can post it to my forums or the OS-specific development tracker and hopefully they can duplicate and resolve it. Keep in mind, though, that any resolution would require an OS upgrade to fix it, and carriers are pretty slow to release them.

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