Features
Mobile Media Revolution
All-Digital entertainment
is on the move.
The arrival of new technologies that enable us to easily
digitize audiovisual media have transformed the entertainment
business and forever changed the way we enjoy media. In the world
of computer technology, both Microsoft and Apple are scrambling
as fast as they can to position their products as the preferred
media hub for the home.
So
far, Apple has taken the conservative route by creating iLife,
a suite of powerful, easy to use media playing and content creation
software apps preloaded onto the hard drives of all new Macs.
The only direct link they've created to the AV system in your
living room in the AirPort Express hub, which in addition to extending
your wireless network can also stream digital audio from your
Mac's iTunes collection, no matter where on your network that
Mac resides. It's a great first step, but many Apple observers
have expressed surprise that the company hasn't released a hardware
media hub of some kind, one that would tie together all the files
maintained by or created with the iLife suite.
Compared
to Apple, Microsoft has taken the more aggressive approach. Last
year, Microsoft released Windows XP Media Center Edition, which
essentially puts a family room-friendly interface on XP that looks
great on a television monitor and can be operated with a remote
control and, optionally, a wireless keyboard. Media Center PCs
as Microsoft defines them are specced out with fast microprocessors,
more RAM, larger and faster drives, high performance video cards,
and television tuner cards. Microsoft wants us to all buy second
Media Center PCs and leave them in the living room, next to the
big TV and home theater components. For smaller spaces, HP and
others offer high performance Media Center laptops with large
displays that eliminate the need for a TV monitor ÷ though even
the best of these offer mediocre audio quality and greatly benefit
from the addition of powered satellite speakers.
Microsoft
Portable Media Center
While it is certainly easy on the eyes, Media Center would only
be mildly interesting if not for its ability to capture and cache
live TV, as many hundreds of thousands of TiVo boxes already do.
In combination with the constantly updated online guide Microsoft
provides, a Media Center PC is a viable alternative to the popular
TiVo service ÷ although at many times the price of admission compared
to a current TiVo-enabled box.
Microsoft
is well aware that they are asking people to spend far more on
their solution, so of course they have argued that their solution
offers so much more that the price is appropriate. With the price
of TiVo down below $150 and the fact that there are a number of
media display devices for photos and music for even less, this
is a highly debatable point.
However,
one place Microsoft's media strategy has a distinct advantage
over Apple is with the addition of the new Portable Media Center
devices from Creative, Samsung, and more makers to come. These
Windows Mobile-based handhelds offer miniature 20GB hard drives
for storing videos, photos, and audio content and large, bright
displays suitable for indoor or outdoor viewing. Battery life
is expected to be adequate for watching two full-length movies
and then some.
Here's
one scenario showing how Microsoft's media vision works: You program
your Media Center PC to capture The Daily Show with John Stewart
every weekday evening. Every evening you cradle your Portable
Media Center (PMC) to charge and sync all your recorded TV programs,
as well as any digital photos you may have added to your My Pictures
folder or audio tracks you may have added to your My Music collection.
In the morning, you jump on the train to work and enjoy your media
selections.
Another
popular scenario is the parent with young children. Fill up the
PMC with Disney movies, SpongeBob episodes, and Raffi albums and
you'll keep them entertained on long trips ÷ at least that's the
theory. I've tested this personally with my 6 year-old daughter
and the Creative PMC and it does work well for her. She likes
having control over the device to chose what show to watch or
which song to listen to.
Archos
AV400 Series Pocket Video Recorder
Many months before Microsoft's announcement of the PMC, Archos
was shipping their portable media player, or PMP. The Archos AV400
design takes a more integrated approach in that it records directly
onto its internal 20 to 80 gigabyte hard drive using standard
S-Video, RCA composite video, and RCA stereo audio cables. It
can even work as a kind of TiVo-to-go since it can be programmed
to capture programs for you when you're not around. Archos doesn't
make a big deal of the fact that you can easily connect an AV400
to the output of a DVD player or laptop and record any movie you
want. The only catch is that the ãrippedä movie is at 320x240
resolution (same as the AV400 display) and can only be played
on your Archos device. Movie pirates will surely be disappointed
but the rest of us will be perfectly happy with this trivial inconvenience.
You can still archive recorded movies to your computer, you just
can't play them on it.
The
scenarios described above apply equally well to the Archos approach.
In fact, it's somewhat more streamlined since you do not need
a Media Center PC in your living room to make it happen. The AV400
comes with a solid docking cradle festooned with every kind of
cable you'd ever need to get content in or out of the device.
Placing the device near your home theater components does not
require redecorating your living room, as the addition of a hulking,
blinking, whining PC tower might demand. When you're ready to
roll, flick the single combo-plug out of the AV400's side and
hit the road.
Other
players coming soon to a store near you
Epson and some smaller outfits have recently announced variations
on the portable media device theme. These machines have their
stand out features ÷ in Epson's case, a gorgeous VGA display.
Like the PMC and PMP offerings, all are hovering around the $500
mark, making them appealing only to the early adopter, first-kid-on-the-block
types with plenty of disposable income for tech-toys. When you
see them under $200, that's when the mass market takes notice.
That's also when you'll see online services like CinemaNow stop
burning through their venture capital and start making some real
money.
Which
portable media device?
I had the pleasure of using both the Creative Zen PMC and an Archos
AV420 for over a month in preparation for writing this feature.
I can sum up my experience by saying that as a multi-platform
computer user, I prefer the Archos unit. The PMC, as you might
imagine, is a Windows-only device, while the AV400 mounts on a
Mac as an external drive for easy bidirectional shuttling of files.
It's not as simple nor as pretty as the Windows Media Player to
Portable Media Center scheme, but it works.
My
preference for the Archos approach is about more than mere Mac-head
convenience; the ability to just jack the thing at will into my
various home AV components or laptop is liberating.
That
said, if I was a proud owner of a tricked out, triple-tuner Media
Center PC in my living room, I'm sure I would have been swayed
towards the PMC due to the smooth integration and consistent user
interface between the two machines. There is also the little matter
of having access to a wide variety of licensed downloadable content.
Windows Media Player 10 now lets you access the Microsoft Media
Mall, a collection of content providers supporting Microsoft's
ãJanusä digital rights management (DRM) scheme, including the
newly launched MSN Music Store, a scared-straight Napster store,
and CinemaNow, a startup offering a selection of relatively new
movies releases in both PC and PMC resolutions.
Online
stores offering cheap, downloadable DRM-enabled music files is
nothing new; Apple's iTunes Music Store is well into its second
year and millions of downloads into the company's phenomenally
successful iPod line of digital music players. Legally downloadable
movies, though, is a new phenomenon that is just starting to catch
the average techie's attention.
I've
spent a month using CinemaNow and have to say that the service
works as advertised. Visual quality on the PMC is perfectly adequate,
though PC-formatted movies are a little on the grainy side on
my two Windows laptops. The company will be improving its encoding
with full support for the new capabilities in Windows Media Player
10, though as of this writing they are still using older WMP 9
encoding.
Users
of Archos devices can access a selection of movies for rent or
to own from a variety of sites supporting the DivX player standard.
DivX support is included in the AV400 line, though the software
installation routine could use some improvement and smoother integration
with the UI.
Both
approaches to downloading video content are a little rough around
the edges; after all, this is a new ballgame. Neither service
I tested offered the newest movie releases that can be had on
DVD, though I did notice plenty of first-run adult titles available
÷ something you won't find at Netflix. Respectable Hollywood is
clearly holding back its most valuable products until they feel
they can trust the DRM these outlets use, while the ãother Hollywoodä
seems perfectly happy to sell you their latest wares and take
their chances with potential piracy.
By
now you have an idea of what might work for you in this compelling
new world of mobile media. Virtually everyone who was born after
1945 grew up in a mediated environment, so it's only natural for
us to want to take it with us everywhere. But instead of a Sony
transistor radio or Casio pocket TV, the new breed of personal
media machine lets you enjoy what you want, when you want. Gigabytes
of randomly accessible entertainment, all delivered in pristine
digital form. Who can resist?
öDM
Living
with portable media:
Time-shifted TV
Watching a two-hour movie on a four-inch screen is tolerable as
long as you hold the device within a 
foot
of your face. That's an uncomfortable position to
hold yourself in unless you are lying down and can rest the thing
on your chest or on a pillow. Watching a half-hour TV show on
a small portable player, though, makes a lot more sense. TV content
is generally less visually rich and emphasizes a performer's voice
more than their movement. Most broadcast content is formatted
for 4:3 display, which translates well to today's players.
Speaking
from my personal experience as a parent of a precocious kindergartner,
I rarely get the opportunity to keep up with my few remaining
favorite TV shows. Having a portable media device at my disposal
has improved things somewhat, but since I have only a five-minute
car commute from home to office, there aren't many opportunities
for me to use what would otherwise be underutilized time. Where
these devices make sense for me is in bed with headphones when
the rest of the house is asleep, and the long-trip scenario described
above. In this last case, I'm obviously not getting to enjoy the
new West Wing episode but at least I'm not hearing ãAre we there
yet, daddy?ä every two minutes from the little blonde angel in
the car seat.
Living
with portable media:
Digital Images
I've
been happily using handheld computers of various brands to display
my digital photographs for as long as there have been color displays
available. This is one of the most enjoyable and popular uses
for handhelds and it beats the heck out of a wallet stuffed of
faded mini-prints in yellowed plastic sleeves. With most compact
digicams using SD cards these days, getting images into your handheld
of choice is an extremely simple operation.
For
more elaborate photo displaying, one of the fine photo presentation
and syncing applications is called for. I'm a foam-finger-waving,
face-painting fan of SplashPhoto (www.splashdata.com) on Palm
OS, Pocket PC, and Symbian platforms and recommend it highly if
you carry more than a dozen images around with you all the time.
Living
with portable media:
Digital Audio
Both the Portable Media Center and Archos' Portable Media Player
line feature digital audio playback using MP3 and WMA file formats.
For those who either don't have or don't want an iPod, using these
devices for audio is a natural. They don't sound as good as iPods
and certainly lack the Apple unit's sophisticated control layout,
but I suspect most Windows users will be quite happy carrying
a single device that plays all their media.
Which
brings up the obvious question: Where is Apple in the nascent
portable media player space? No one except the company's inner
circle knows for sure, but I think they will have to get into
the space. An ãiPod AVä device that leverages their QuickTime
media player architecture as well as their world-beating iPod/iTunes
hardware and software design. Such a device is easy to imagine
and Apple certainly has the expertise to do it extremely well
÷ the question is this: Will they jump in this year, or wait until
Microsoft, Archos, and the other early entrants build a market,
then dive in with a splash and pretend Apple was in front all
along. It worked with the iPod and it would work in the new AV
frontier as well. When presented with a stunning new Apple product,
it's as though the public forgets all that has come before and
praise Steve Jobs and his fellow Vulcans for enlightening us all.
Living
with portable media:
Radio, radio
Radio
isn't the force it was a decade ago, before the internet and before
ClearChannel Communications bought the airwaves and the FCC, then
systematically snuffed out all broadcast innovation in the name
of the almighty dollar. For those, like me, who still care to
listen to public radio programs and low-power college stations,
there are now ways to capture broadcast streams for replay any
time you like. Griffin Technologies (griffintechnology.com) has
released their highly anticipated radioSHARK desktop radio machine
for Macs and Windows PCs ($70). This ultra cool-looking device
does for radio what TiVo does for television. Using a single USB
connection, the radioSHARK is controlled with supplied software
to tune in the desired station, then it starts buffering the stream
in its cache on to your hard disk. Want to hear a song again?
Rewind. Want to pause Car Talk for a bio-break? Pause. Want to
capture Fresh Air every weekday morning from 9:00ö10:00? The radioSHARK
can be easily programmed to do it for you unattended ÷ just be
sure you leave your computer on! Best of all, any captured radio
is saved in standard, unprotected audio formats: WAV and AIFF
for Windows and AAC and AIFF for Macs. These files can be added
to your iTunes audio library with a click, or to other music players
with a little more effort. Once on your portable media device
of choice, these programs are yours to enjoy on your schedule
instead of the station manager's.
No
discussion of modern radio would be complete without mention of
the two digital alternatives: internet radio stations and satellite
radio services such as Sirius and XM. Since there is no way legal
I know of to capture encrypted satellite radio streams and play
them back at your leisure, we're left with net radio ÷ websites
that broadcast long loops of recorded audio at bitrates typically
ranging from 32kbps to 128kbps. Most of these stations are commercial-free,
though many do hound you to subscribe to their ãpremiumä services
or to buy CDs through their site. Desktop players do not offer
any way to capture net radio streams, but using inexpensive software
such as Audio Hijack for Mac OS X (rogueamoeba.com) or WM Recorder
for Windows (wmrecorder.com) you can easily do so. Captured streams
can then be saved in standard audio formats and synchronized to
any mainstream portable media device.
öDM
Creative
Zen Portable Media Center
The first must-have accessory for your Media Center PC
Perhaps
the best way to think of the Personal Media Center is as a hardware
ãplug-inä for either Windows Media Player 10 or your Media Center
Edition PC at home ÷ if you have one. This Windows Mobile-based
device does one thing and one thing only: play back digital video,
audio, and photographs that you have stored in Windows Media Player
10, a free download from Microsoft.
Like
ActiveSync on a Pocket PC, your media files auto-synchronize across
a USB cable ÷ USB 2.0, in this case, with a peppy transfer rate
between 2 and 2.5 megabits per second. The built-in 20GB hard
drive would fill up pretty fast without some heavy transcoding,
which happens automatically in the background. The PMC as a class
internally supports Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio
(WMA), MP3 audio, and JPEG. All other formats must be transcoded
to play on the device. Popular DivX and MPEG4 formats require
you to install third-party codecs into Windows Media Player 10,
but these are readily available on the net.
Though
on the large side, this is the first of a new class of device
so we really can't be too hard on it. The upside is that the display
is big (3.8-inch diagonally measured), the battery lasts for two
movies and beyond, and the controls are all easy to use and understand,
even in the dark. I spent a few minutes with a late pre-production
model of the upcoming Samsung PMC, which is truly shirt pocket-size
but has a smallish display, tiny buttons, and shorter battery
life. There are always trade-offs in product design. For my money,
the larger screen makes all the difference in what is, after all,
an audiovisual media player. It's nice to have a big enough display
to distinguish between, say, Charlize Theron and Cameron Diaz.
What
sets the PMC apart from the approach exemplified by the Archos
AV400 series is the total dependence on a Windows PC loaded with
Windows Media Player 10. And to get full functionality for your
PMC, you really should have a Windows XP Media Center Edition
PC permanently married to your home theater components. The killer
feature of all these PMC/PMP/PVP gizmos is their ability to let
you take your favorite television shows with you and watch them
when it's convenient. Carry thousands of digital pictures and
movies of your kids? Cool. Carry gigabytes of digital music? Cool.
Carry a few full-length movies from CinemaNow? Cool. Carry the
last few weeks episodes of Enterprise, The West Wing, and The
Daily Show with John Stewart and Science Channel's Discoveries
This Week to spend time with science-babe Gillian Deacon? Extremely
cool.
Microsoft
gets twisted
Microsoft has broken some intriguing new ground with the PMC's
user interface. Their new twist navigation feature is woven into
every part of the device's UI, simplifying getting items added
to playlists and getting them playing with minimal thought involved.
It's difficult to describe how this shifting x/y axis works, but
I found it easy to wrap my mind around it in just a few seconds.
Most users won't even be aware of the logic behind it ÷ they'll
just enjoy getting where they want and what they want in a hurry.
Devotees
of Media Center PCs who have an itch to take their media on the
road should march right out and take a long look the Creative
Zen PMC. It will extend the media experience (as Microsoft defines
it) to wherever you play best.
öDM
www.creative.com
Archos
AV420 Pocket Video Recorder
Mini-TiVo that fits in your pocket is also a photo viewer and
music player
While
the previous personal media devices from Archos have left me wanting
more for the money they're asking, the AV420 had me checking my
MasterCard balance to see if I could afford to purchase my review
loaner. This device defines the category and sets the bar very
high for all those devices that will follow.
As
I laid out in the body of this feature, Archos has taken a different
route than what Microsoft has decided to specify for all Portable
Media Center licensees. The Archos 400 series ÷ the last two digits
in the model name designates the capacity of the hard drive in
gigabytes, from 20 to 80 ÷ is not merely a playback device, as
is the PMC as currently defined. It's a complete recording solution,
MPEG4 for video and good old MP3 for audio. No computer is required
to capture AV streams from just about any analog device using
RCA stereo audio, RCA composite video, or S-Video jacks. Even
DRM-protected media can be rendered for the small screen, but
cannot be played anywhere else.
Which
isn't a problem for captured television; you can use the AV420
as a VCR connected to any standard TV monitor. Output is a little
bit grainier than you'll get form a TiVo Series II deck, but serviceable
in a pinch.
Display
quality is flat-out excellent. It far looked better than I expected
it would considering it's moderate 320x240 pixel dimensions and
3.5-inch diagonal measurement. Its bright and easily viewable
by two people sitting next to each other ÷ perfect for kids in
the backseat. And there's a speaker loud enough for them to hear
it, though the bass response is of course non-existent in such
a small driver. Suggestion to Archos: make a clip-on powered stereo
speaker sleeve for multi-human viewing scenarios.
This
device won't be taking the place of any TiVo components, as it
lacks one of the most compelling aspects of the service: the constantly
updated guide and the automatic recording of shows the service
believes you might enjoy, based on your previous viewing habits.
There is a kludgey method outlined in the manual involving downloading
HTML guides from Yahoo, but most of us will simply have to know
the exact time, date, and duration of any show we want to record
for later viewing.
Fiddling
If you can hang with that much fiddling to get the shows you want,
you may or may not need the included IR emitted that can change
channels on your cable/satellite box at the designated time. With
the AV420 in its cradle, you can use the supplied remote control
to operate it, but this is only of real utility when using the
unit to drive a larger external monitor.
In
addition to all the great video recording features that are the
AV420's primary mission, it also excels as a digital music player
for files encoded in MP3 and WMA formats. You can also store your
digital photos in there as well, which pretty much completes the
personal digital media box picture. Where previous devices from
Archos have had questionable user interfaces and fiddly controls,
the AV420 is easy to navigate for anyone who has ever used Windows
Explorer or the Mac Finder. Its simple hierarchical folder structure
is clearly labeled and makes total sense. Buttons and controls
are easy to figure out after a minute or two of experimentation
÷ most users will not need to consult the manual.
It's
not cheap at a street price of just under $500, but there's nothing
else that comes close to what it can do.
öDM
www.archos.com
The
portable media player you already own
As a reader of this magazine, chances are good you have in your
possession a laptop computer and a late-model handheld computer
capable of delivering audiovisual content. Watching DVDs on a
laptop is old hat for most of us these days, and listening to
music from audio files or spinning CDs is positively prehistoric.
Whether or not schlepping around a multi-pound laptop is something
you want to do every day is something only you can decide, but
they do work extremely well as general purpose media delivery
machines.
Better
handhelds have been delivering digital audio for quite some time
now, and those from the last three years or so have been reasonably
good at handling video files of shorter than movie lengths. Playback
time was mostly limited by the low capacity and high cost of flash
media cards we had to deal with until recently. Today's 300+ MHz
Pocket PCs and Palms have the oomph to deliver glitchless 30 frame-per-second
video, all stored on dirt-cheap 512MB to 1GB SecureDigital and
CompactFlash cards. But battery life remains a bottleneck for
most devices, particularly those without warm-swappable battery
packs and fat, extended battery packs.
I've
written recently about authoring titles such as DVD to Pocket
PC, Moviemaker for Symbian-powered smartphones, and Kinoma Producer
for Palm OS devices(Handheld Computing 7.2 October 2004). In a
nutshell, these are workable solutions for occasional use but
too much hassle for something you'd want to refresh every few
days. If the hassle factor doesn't bother you and you carry a
handheld with you anyway, software like this is a great place
to start and costs far less than any device solution you can buy
this year.
What
about a Tablet PC?
Microsoft's Smart Display initiative went down with a thud last
year after a scant few months on store shelves. The concept of
a display pad with a high-speed, 300-foot wireless connection
to your multi-gigahertz desktop XP box in the upstairs den was
intriguing, but overpriced, underpowered, and almost impossible
to sell to a skeptical market.
Which
is just as well, since the best of the second generation of Tablet
PC machines now on the market are infinitely better suited to
couch computing than Smart Displays could ever hope to be.
Pure
tablet designs, as opposed to laptop-derived convertible tablets
with attached swivel-away keyboards, are king in the realm of
the La-Z-Boy. My favorite is the HP Compaq T1100, which is the
computer I vote Most Likely to Appear in a Science Fiction Movie.
The keyboard unclips from the sleek 2-pound tablet, making it
as easy to carry around the castle as a Michael Crichton hardback.
The 1Ghz Intel Centrino processor, 512MB of RAM, built-in WiFi,
long battery life, and the generously wide viewing angle display
make it a pleasure to use from turret to dungeon.
I
use my tablet for checking email, reading the news, and for looking
up bits of information when I'm downstairs, away from my home
office. With a spare AC adapter on the side table next to my throne,
I am lord and master of my domain.
What's
the downside? Tablet PCs are still pricier than common laptops
by a few C-notes and they lack optical drives for playing DVDs.
Even so, tablets rule.
öDM
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