Hello everyone!
I wanted to take a minute to put together a guide for viewing media on your TouchPad. This guide is for both those who already have a TouchPad as well as those whoe are intrested in TouchPad but just want more info. Even though the Palm brand is gone, the "style" of Palm still it exists in that TouchPad has multiple options for accessing Media. You've got lots of choices and I'll highlight the ones that I've tested and are probably the most popular.
Please note, this is not an exhaustive list. There's no way I could list everything this product will work with. Mainly because by the time I'm done writing it, it would be out of date. 
Anyway, let's get to the good stuff:
P1 - Music:
Music has 2 distinct cateogries of options. You can go with a cable solution or a cloud solutions... both will work. Since TouchPad is all about not needing cords, let's talk about the cloud solutions first:
Amazon Cloud Player:
That's right, this handly service from Amazon works great on TouchPad. It's really quite simple.
- Add your music
A) When buying new music from Amazon, make sure you save it to your "Cloud Drive"
or
B) Upload your existing music library from your computer - On your TouchPad, browse to http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer and enjoy
For more information on Amazon Cloud Player, see http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2658409011
Google Music Beta:
Yep, this one works too! If you've signed up and been approved for the Google Music Beta, then you're ready to go.
- Download and install the Google Music Manager
- Configure the app to your desire (usually just sync the whole My Music folder)
- On your TouchPad, browse to http://music.google.com and enjoy
For more information on Google Music Beta, see http://music.google.com/about/
Radio:
If radio is your thing, then you've got a whole host of options. You can either check out the different application in the App Catalog (for example, Pandora or iHeartRadio) or try browsing the website of your favorite radio station. The TouchPad web browser supports flash so most website radio streams will work.
Now let's talk about the old-fashioned cable methods. There's basically 2 main was to this. You can either use a Music manager to sync, or you can manually copy and paste.
HP Play:
HP has a an application in Beta called HP Play. Right now, it'll sync your music library (including iTunes playlists if you use iTunes) with your TouchPad. What's great about this is it's automatic. If you plug-in TouchPad and go to USB Drive mode, HP Play kicks in and starts syncing. Here's how to get up and going with HP Play.
- On your PC, head over to http://www.hpplay.com and click Download
- Install the Program and choose your configuration options.
If you don't use iTunes, you can use the File Menu to "import" your library. I put "import" in quotes because it doesn't actually do anything with the files other than index them and copy them to your TouchPad. - Plug-in your TouchPad and tap on the USB Drive option
- When the sync is done, click the Eject button in HP Play to safely remove your TouchPad
- Open the Music app and enjoy!
Remember that HP Play is still in Beta. I have a feeling a lot more will be coming with this App. Either way, make sure you head on back to http://www.hpplay.com and provide feedback on the app once you've used it for a bit.
Windows Media Player:
Windows Media Player has the ability to sync with any regular old USB Device. The big catch here is that the default file format for Windows Media Player is .wma and this file type is not supported on the TouchPad. If you're already using Windows Media Player and want to continue using it, you'll need to change the RIP options to use a different format (see http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Change
Anyway, once you have all your files in a compatible format, follow the steps at this article to setup syncing through Windows Media Player: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Set-up
Straight Up USB:
For those of you who prefer to do things manually, you can always copy and paste files directly to TouchPad while in USB Drive mode. As long as the files are in a compatible file format, the TouchPad will find them reguardless of the directory structure. So feel free to make a Music folder with sub-folders for Artists and Albums and whatever else you want.
P2 - Videos (in progress):
Before you start ripping DVDs, check your countries laws on DVD ripping. Laws vary from country to country and you should be familiar with yours before you start ripping DVDs.
Video Sizes:
So, depending on the DVD, you're going to want to choose between two different sizes for your final video:
- For widescreen videos: 853x480
- For fullscreen videos: 640x480
The main reason for this is that TouchPad always plays videos in Landscape orientation (1024x768) and DVD's are natively at 480 verticle pixels.
There is one exception to the rules above: if the DVD is a letterboxed DVD. In this case, you'll want to crop & zoom the final output. The exact resolution will vary slightly from program to program, but you should get something close to 858x336. If you do not crop and zoom, you'll have EXTRA black bars on the top and bottom of your video.
Recomended Video Settings:
There are still questions I have about all the supported codecs and containers, but I wanted to put down some recomended settings based on my testing so far. They are:
- Container: MPEG-4 (.mp4 or .m4v extension - both worked for me)
- Video Codec: H.264 Encoder
- Audio Codec: AAC Encder
Why these settings? In all of my testing so far, this was the only configuration that worked flawlessly every single time. It also happens to be one of the default configurations for the ripper that I use. Besides the fact that these settings worked consistantly, there's also another benefit. Both H.264 and AAC offer excellent quality AND really good compressions. This means that movies look and sound good, but also take up less space on your TouchPad. I did a side by side comparison of a "live" DVD and my ripped video using the above encoders and didn't notice a difference in quality at all. Add to that the fact that my videos look great on TouchPad, and that is why I'm recommending these options.
Watch Out For Large File Sizes:
For those that don't know, the USB Drive portion of TouchPad uses the FAT32 filesystem. The advantage of this is that it works on just about every single system there is (Windows, Mac, *nix, etc). The down side is that this filesystem can only support individual files that are less then 4GB in size. In a few of the rippers I saw, there were iPad presets that enabled 64-bit support (i.e. let you have files bigger than 4GB). While this worked fine on my PC, it failed miserably on my TouchPad. Every single time this option was enabled, no matter how big the file was, my TouchPad didn't even recognize that the file was there. The good news is that if you use the settings I mentioned above, you will never hit that 4GB file size. My DVD's averaged 500MB to 1.2GB (Transformers 2 being the biggest of this range). As you can see, these sizes are well under our 4GB limit.
Umm... Which Movie Is Which?:
So the other thing I ran into with Videos is that there is no label, be it file name or tag or otherwise. Also, there is no preview image. It's just a gray video looking box icon for each one. So here's my work-arounds till HP gets around to fixing this.
Option 1 - Ugly but quick:
Create Folders for each Movie in the ROOT of the USB Drive on your TouchPad. Don't worry about sticking them in the DCIM/PALM100 folder. I actually had more success sticking the folders in the Root. Make sure the name of the Folder matches the name of the movie but don't include special characters - letters and numbers only (spaces were ok in my testing). Then, copy the ripped file to the folder and wait at least 30 seconds till after the OS says the copy is done. Then EJECT the TouchPad... don't just stop the device. To Eject TouchPad:
- Open My Computer
- Right click on the TouchPad Drive
- Select Eject
- Remove the cable when it the OS says it's safe to do so
That being said, when you open the Photos & Videos app, you should now have Albums for each of your movies. Tap on the Album, then tap the grey movie icon and enjoy!
Option 2 - Prettier but more work:
It is possible to manually edit the MP4 tag to include a preview image. To accomplish this, I used two free & cross-platform programs: VLC and EasyTag. I used VLC to play the video up to the title screen and capture a screenshots (select Snapshot from the Video menu and remember where you save the file). Then, open the video with EasyTag, select the Picture tab, and add the screenshot you just took. Save the changes and copy/move the file to a folder in your TouchPad. Your video now has an icon with the title in it. The icon isn't exactly centered, but it makes it much easier to organize videos into "Albums" and to quickly identify which movie you're selecting.
Just like the previous option, you need to Eject the TouchPad rather than just stopping it.
Also, for both methods: you may still need to reboot the TouchPad for the videos to show up. I've noticed that, especially for full length movies, it can take a couple minutes for the files to show up.
Still to do:
- Start a comprehensive list of working codecs/containers
- Add cloud-based viewing/streaming solutions
If you have done some testing and found a particular combination to work well, please feel free to add to this thread and I'll update the list.
Comming Soon: P3 - Pictures
