[General Topics] Menneisyys:
The hacks I've used / referred to:

Adding A2DP (and AVRCP) support to WM2003 devices

WM2003 devices should use the Widcomm 1.6 HP Bluetooth AV upgrade to gain A2DP / AVRCP support. The update is officially only meant for HP iPAQ 5550 devices but it works (to some degree) on other Widcomm-based WM2003 devices too (you can install it on any device – the installer isn’t locked to the particular PPC model). Note that you shouldn’t except miracles: for example, on my HP iPAQ 2210, the sound sometimes stops for 1-2 seconds and, what is worse, it gets a considerably lower, really annoying pitch for some 10-15 seconds before this. That is, it’s highly possible you’ll find it useless on your particular WM2003 model too - it's only certified to work on the 5550.

Adding A2DP (and AVRCP) support to WM2003SE devices

(Widcomm-based) WM2003SE devices should use the hack CAB available here. See this and this for a generic discussion. Note that you shouldn’t try updating your WM2003SE device with the Widcomm 1.6 HP Bluetooth AV upgrade (see the WM2003-related section above) meant for plain WM2003 devices (you can, however, give it a try - it may work - or not). At least on my Pocket Loox 720, it would never stop discovering the services of my Plantronics and, therefore, seems to be useless.

Unfortunately, this update has severe problems: no matter what model it’s installed on, the sound transfer will just stop after some dozens of minutes and can only be restarted by explicitly disabling Bluetooth on the PDA and, then, reconnecting to the headphone (fortunately, no soft reset is necessary). This makes listening to music wirelessly really painful on the long run.

Note that exactly the same applies to the (current) Widcomm version 0.50 “hack” for the WM5-upgraded Dell Axim x50(v) and the entire x51(v) series: from time to time, the sound transfer will just stop and, then, you'll need to reconnect to the headset. (This problem may be only related to the 590A only - I haven't really seen similar bug reports in the above-linked thread - neither have I seen here.) This won't be a problem with most x51(v) users as the built-in A2DP / AVRCP support in AKU2.3 works with most headphones without making it necessary to install the Widcomm BT stack. It seems, however, it doesn't work with the 590A - using the standard, built-in A2DP support of WM5 AKU2, the music transfer to my 590A would stop after some 0.2-0.3 seconds. The case is exactly the same with the AKU 2.0 HTC Universal. Interestingly, FirstLoox owner Duncan hasn't run into this problem with his 590A, using the built-in A2DP support on his F-S N560.

Adding A2DP (and AVRCP) support the HTC Wizard

The HTC Wizard, unfortunately, which doesn’t have support for A2DP at all even in AKU2+ ROMs. Therefore, you'll need the CAB file available here (linked from this post in this thread; to be on the safe side, I’ve also made it available here. Note that it’s highly recommended that you also import this registry file after installing the CAB file (the latter is discussed here, here, here and here).

Note that, even with the registry hack, the sound quality of the Wizard over A2DP has remained considerably worse (it has pretty bad compression effects) than with my other test Pocket PC’s (with all media player apps - this means it's not a media player issue but that of the A2DP hack). Give it a try to see if you can live with the (comparatively) lower sound quality. Furthermore, unlike with the other solutions, after finishing a call, the music doesn’t automatically restart – you must manually press the Pause button on the headset.

Making the Pocket Player AVRCP work under WM5

(Big thanks to PPCT / AximSite forum member Haesslich for summarizing it so that I didn’t need to look / experiment with it up myself much.)

Get the Conduits WMP Plugin Adapter 1.1 from the plug-in page (I really recommend it if you, for example, want to get FLAC or MOD support for your Pocket Player) (direct link to the download).

Unzip gen_wmhost.dll from the archive and put it in the home directory of your installed application ([Storage card name]\Program Files\Conduits\Pocket Player).

Go to Menu/More/Options (in 3.0; in 2.8, Menu/Options) and select the Plugins tab (it’ll be on the far right)

Single-click “Conduits WM Plugin Adapter”, when the context menu comes up, select “Configure”.

Click the “Configure WM plugins to load” button.

Under version 2.8, it’ll ask four questions; under 3.0, two. Click “Yes” in all cases.

Click OK and restart Pocket Player. Now, remote controlling should work OK.

The results shown in the comparison chart

As can clearly be seen, with the Plantronics Pulsar 590A stereo headset, none of the four third-party applications supported it under all OS’es flawlessly. For example,

MortPlayer only supported AVRCP on WM5 devices with the Widcomm BT stack; it won’t work on WM5 devices with the Microsoft BT stack or on any pre-WM5 device

Pocket Player only supported pre-WM5 devices without additional hacking; it doesn’t work under WM5 (with neither of the two most common Bluetooth stacks). Fortunately, with the above-explained "hack" it's working just great on all my WM5 devices.

Finally, the case is just the opposite with TCPMP, which only supports WM2003SE devices, AVRCP-wise. It doesn’t work on WM2003 / WM5 devices at all.

The most AVRCP-compliant multimedia player is iPlay - it worked flawlessly on all my test devices, except for the Widcomm 1.6-based WM2003 ones. In there, previous / next wasn't available.

As can also be seen, you don’t need to be afraid of the CPU usage (battery consumption) figures of these applications. While Pocket Player uses about two times more CPU cycles than TCPMP or iPlay (the latter two without the equalizer), it’s still way better than some other, non-AVRCP-capable (and, therefore, not reviewed) multimedia players like ViTO SoundExplorer, which (at least in older versions) consumed way more CPU time when playing plain MP3 files as can also be seen in these benchmarks. Enabling the really nice Reverb feature on 40iPlay “only” doubles its CPU usage – then, it’s still not much worse than that of players that otherwise consume considerably more CPU cycles even without any DSP’s or equalizers enabled (MortPlayer, Pocket Player). That is, if you need the reverb effect (give it a try – it’s really cool), you can safely enable it.

N.B. Once again, the compatibility chart is based on my compliance tests with the Plantronics Pulsar 590A. With other headsets, you may have (slightly) different results (as has also been mentioned in the chart – see my comments in parentheses). I will continue posting compatibility information with other stereo headsets hopefully as early as next week.