Microsoft's Portable Media Center Devices: Exposed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Watching TV and Movies
Microsoft intended Portable Media Center devices to be truly used as multi-purpose devices, so they expected their users to not only want to listen to music, but also to want to take other types of their content with them on the go - in particular, their favorite TV shows and movies.We've already discussed the issues with getting video content onto the PMC, but what about when you're actually viewing it on the PMC?
As you'll soon see, the quality of your video matters quite a bit in order to be able to get the most viewing pleasure out of the device. With such a small screen, low resolution and relatively high data compression, it is very easy to get a blocky, blurry mess when viewing content on the PMC.
Navigating through video content is fairly simple, but without any "album art", you are left with scrolling through text in order to find what you want. Granted, if you keep the PMC clean of anything that you've already watched and don't have a desire to watch again, then this isn't a big deal; but let your collection get too big, and navigation will suffer.
We put everything from TV shows to movies that we downloaded from links in the AnandTech Off Topic Forum on our PMC only to be met with mixed results. Even at the highest quality settings, if the original content was of questionable quality, then you're going to have a hard time discerning one thing from another.
The Zen PMC came with clips from old TV shows. We swear that we didn't actually PVR The Incredible Hulk - honestly.
For the most part, shows recorded from cable TV using Windows XP MCE at its Best quality setting made it over well to the PMC. Unfortunately, that means that you're looking at over 300MB for every 30 minutes of content that you store on the PMC.
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Reflex - Thursday, September 30, 2004 - link
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+focuses+on+camera+co...Thats the announcement on MTP. Its an open standard and anyone can support it. Its NOT tied to Windows Media Player 10.
crepticdamion - Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - link
Hello, it seems some people know more than AnandTech concerning this article.There are other MUCH better solutions that are not from Microsoft. I don't have anything against Microsoft (even had a lot of PocketPC generations and still have 2 PocketPCs) but when the Microsoft product is worse than the others, well I won't have it because is Microsoft. With me, the better product (overall) always wins.
Put that apart, this PMC is completely so MUCH weaker than Archos AV400 product, that my heart screams with indignation regarding this article. The diference in Size, Weight, Performance, Capacity (AV480 has 80GB, while AV420 is 20GB as PMC), and what Archos does more is infinite. Microsft ALWAYS looses.
I advise everyone that read this article to go search on Yahoo or Google for an Archos AV400 Review. Your mind will be boggled with its capacities and it is already available.
Archos AV400 is several years ahead of everyone else in these products and they deserve it, they've been working on this for almost a decade.
Good Hunting and always compare the alternatives.
Pjotr - Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - link
#14, That's why the Archos is so much better.Wizkid - Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - link
That hard drive is capable of 16MB/sec minimum. The rediculously slow transfer rate must be a software or implementation issue.mindless1 - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
Transcode the video?I think I'll wait for a non-crippled PM player.
ViRGE - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
At 320x240 and 10MB/min needed for the best video quality, it seems Microsoft is working way too hard here. Those specs are right around the sweet-spot for MPEG1 of all things, which is fast & easy to encode and decode, and at such a low resolution would return very similar results. Obviously MS is planning for the future here, and on that note, these devices will be much more notable once they start using full VGA screens instead of QVGA.michael2k - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
Hmm, I call.This thing can only do 2MB/s with USB2.0 on video transfer? And you blame the laptop drive for that?
My laptop (PowerBook 400) can field 16MB/s, and my iPod 2G with it's PCMCIA sized drive can field 12MB/s.
Of course they were both using the FireWire interface, and they were talking to other, faster, hard drives, but still...
Reflex - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
Pjotr - I have nothing against the Archos or anything, however no special software is needed for the Creative product. The only reason WMP10 needs to be installed is to add MTP support to Windows, but you are free from then on to use any MTP aware software to transfer data, or you can do so simply through explorer if you wish, its browseable through there(something Anandtech forgot to mention).Not saying anything bad about Archos, just pointing out that MTP devices are just as easy to transfer to and from.
val - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
9: yes but think about use case, i do not want to watch movies so often somewhere to buy such a device. PDA makes much more fun on long trips, holiday or waiting for the bus. And if i would watch them, i like to record them in full quality and than convert from PC.Pjotr - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
#8,Maybe for the Windows PMC device, but not for Archos. Archos AV series are fully stand alone with video input for recording straight into MPEG-4 to the device HD for later playback to the video output. Read the product info on the link I posted above. There is no need to transfer movies from a computer, or record onto a computer, or covert into formats readable by the device.
I think the Archos is light years ahead of the Windows version in practical applicability.