I guess first things first… A brief introduction… Some of the people reading this will be friends of mine who have been eagerly waiting (impatiently) for some time in fact. If you’re one of them, then too bad, you’ll have to wait a bit more.
I’m Corey Gouker (obviously); I’m a Media Center MVP who hangs out in the Microsoft newsgroups for everything Digital Media and Media Center related. I’m 20 years old and starting up college again at SJSU after already doing a year abroad at the University of Manchester in the Queen’s Country.
I’m pretty much an average geek. I think anything electronic (that at least has some class and style) is totally sexy. For example my cell phone, my Klipsch 5.1 Ultra’s, a 2TB RAID, a super fast Internet connection, you name it. If it’s geeky, chances are I love it and might find it sexy. And please, I don’t mean to get you worried at this point, I don’t find them attractive in a sexual way or anything like that, I’m much more drawn to a nice 5’8” red head than anything made of silicon, LOL, err, no pun intended. Besides that, I’m just an average guy with an anything but average collection of digital media. Some stats I compiled about a month ago are pretty out there. I was sitting on a 204GB collection of music. That’s approximately 44,190 tracks for the curious. My main Media Center Edition PC has a 250GB HDD which at any given time has about 200GB of recorded TV. Then there’s about 500 or so DVDs as well. I’m not even going to guess on the number of pictures, all I know is that there’s a 50 CD folder sitting on a book shelf that is filled with DVD+R’s with nothing but JPG’s from my Canon G2. I’ve actually warn out 3 batteries in the little time I’ve had the camera.
I personally don’t own that many media devices. In fact, I’ve only got one at the moment. A small but nice 256MB Creative MuVo TX. I’m in a unique situation in that unlike some, I couldn’t hope to fit my entire collection on a device to take it with me. Whether it be music, videos, TV, or pictures. I’ve almost bought a Dell DJ, 40GB iRiver, and 20GB Rio Karma, but didn’t buy any since I still felt none of them quite fit what I had in mind.
Being a Media Center MVP with some interest in the Digital Media Division as well, I’ve been keeping track as much as possible about some of the new stuff coming along.
Portable Media Centers (PMC) really caught my eyes and ears when I first heard about them. Back then I hadn’t a clue what size drives they’d have so I had high hopes that they might be a breakthrough device that would fit my needs perfectly. Something that would really do damage to Apple’s iPod. While some might have put the idea out there that Microsoft wanted the PMC to be an iPod killer, I don’t really think this is true. I think most people within Microsoft who were working in the area knew perfectly well that this device was different and really could not be compared with previous Portable Music Players. The OEMs that signed on to make the device, Creative, iRiver, Samsung, knew the device was different. The only real way they could be compared would be in terms of size, weight, battery life, easy of use, style, and sexiness. The feature set of a PMC far surpasses a regular Portable Music Player. Besides it having a GUI that’s strikingly similar to the Media Center (imagine that) it’s got the PMP part down perfectly. You’ve got playlists, album art, and all that. But you’ve also got videos, TV, and pictures. It really is a on the go Media Center. Or like Microsoft says, [almost] all your media. Here. There. Everywhere.
The devices can be used with or without a Media Center PC but it really does go hand in hand with a MCE. The recorded TV aspect of the device almost makes a MCE a given. It’s not a device that you plug into a cable box and record TV on it for the cross country trip, and you don’t put DVD’s into a slot and watch them that way. To some this might seem pretty odd. I mean, where do you get the video and TV content then? Well. With a Media Center PC you’ll be sure to have plenty of Recorded TV content. As for Movies and Video content, well there are/will be a number of content providers doing subscription/pay for download solutions that will let people download and sync their content to a PMC through MP10 with the help of Janus DRM technology. Not got enough music? MSN Music will help you out there as well. But really one of the main things in WMP10 is Janus. CinemaNow.com will have movies available for purchase or rent directly from the net and they’re already in WMV format, perfect for the PMC. Storing home movies from DV cams is also quite easy when combined with Windows Movie Maker and such. PapaJohn, another MVP, will probably have plenty to add to that. The biggest thing will be the entire rental model for Music. This is quite a bit different than what we’ve got now. Now you pay 99 cents and you’ve got your song. Soon you’ll pay your monthly subscription fee and be able to select all the songs you want to be able to download and listen to, as long as you’ve got a license for those and are paying those monthly fees you’ll be able to listen to that music. You aren’t actually paying for each track and don’t own them. To me this seems like an all around best scenario for music. As long as those monthly fees are right I think this should be a success. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a couple price points as well. Say a $5.95, 9.95, 19.95, and 29.95 plans. Hopefully that “expensive” plan will allow for unlimited listening. We’ll see.
Back when my Mom was being educated on MCE’s and PMC’s, she really didn’t understand the concept of only having digital content. So I showed her MovieLink and a couple other sites. After having a Media Center PC in the house for a bit she wanted it in the living room to use, she wanted all her stimulating reality TV shows, Queer Eye, and home improvement programs recorded so she could follow what was happening on every possible reality program available. Quite scary really. But anyway, the point is that after a while our entire TV lifestyle changed. I personally didn’t have a clue what time anything came on anymore, stopped channel surfing, and my TV time was cut down drastically. It was a real change, TV started becoming a 1 or 2 hour a day type thing that I did while eating dinner and relaxing. With a PMC I can easily see that changing again. With daily schedules becoming tighter and tighter a PMC would let someone take entertainment with them wherever and enjoy it at any time and not just enjoy it at home. In that regard, PMC’s really are different from previous types of portable media devices.
Before you’d have your MP3/WMA player and might only use it while out walking, jogging, biking, shopping, driving, whatever. It was only music though and really didn’t do much more than a Walkman did. PMC’s will let people download a movie to a device, go to a friends house, plug the A/V cable into a TV and enjoy all their music, pictures, movies, and videos with friends and family. Or a person on the go might carry it with them on the road and enjoy their favorite TV series while in a hotel. Maybe I’m making the device out to be something totally revolutionary. I don’t mean to, but it is a pretty new way of handling media. This is only the start and I’m sure gradually PMC’s will change the way people think about how they interact with their media.
So recently out of the blue I got an email from my MVP Lead, Andrew, if I wanted a PMC to play with for a bit. I was like, what in the world, why me, why now? Especially since the PMC is not an eHome product like Media Center is. It’s a Windows Mobile device that’s really under the Digital Media Division at Microsoft. So except for the fact that it’s called a Portable “Media Center” and that it’s got a very similar Start (green) button and the UI is also very similar to the desktop Media Center. It is not a Media Center and doesn’t belong to eHome. Hence my reasons for wondering why they decided to send one to me. But whatever… I immediately replied and two days later a 20GB Creative Zen PMC was waiting at my doorstep when I arrived home. When I first picked up the box I was a bit surprised at the size of the box and such and how light it was. I honestly thought it was another Media Center Remote to try out (I’ve got like 4 or 5 of them). So I began opening it up with anticipation that it might actually be a PMC. Of course… there it was. I’m not sure why exactly but I was actually pretty excited even though I knew I’d only get around 2 weeks or so to play with it and decide for myself if it really was a big deal and whether I’d end up buying one sometime soon. Andrew didn’t give me a choice in terms of the device. I might have asked for an iRiver PMC or most likely a Samsung. But heck, beggars can’t be choosers.
First thing I did when I got the device out of the box; I plugged in the juice to get it going. Then I started examining it to see if it would be easy to take it apart, LOL. Sadly while I’m sure it is; I don’t have a screw driver small enough at the moment. So that’ll probably have to wait for a couple more days. I’m always kind of curious about the batteries they use in these devices since you’ve got Li-Ion or Li-Poly, Ni-Mh are becoming a thing of the past I think. Both providing really good battery life, but Polymer usually are even lighter than Ion and are a bit more advanced. So I was quite pleased when I saw a 3.7V Li-Ion Polymer Battery in there that had 3.6Ah.
Luckily I had to go out for a bit and take care of some things. I was totally ready to just load the thing with a 20GB selection of music from my 204GB selection but sadly that would have to wait. Instead I brought my little tiny 256MB Creative MuVo TX with me which had a whopping 4 CD’s on it. Just my luck though when I got to the Wash America Laundromat and went to play some tunes the AAA battery turns out to be dead. I get back in after an hour or so and check the PMC. I unplug it and try turning it on, it doesn’t come on, I take the battery out and pop it back in, still nothing. Keep the battery out and plug it in, still nothing, then I pull the power out slowly and with the plug in half way the screen goes white. I was baffled. I thought the device might be dead. After letting it charge again for another hour or so I tried again, still nothing. I tried some tricks to get it to turn on that sometimes work with electronics and such. Like holding the power button in and popping the battery in and plugging it in, trying the reset button, holding the Start (aka green) button and pressing power, everything I could come up with. Finally, somehow the device turned on. I was set. I kept it plugged in and started playing. Being a curious geek I went to the Settings and About screen. By that it was pretty easy to tell the device wasn’t final. So I asked Andrew and was informed that I was sent a really really expensive engineering sample or something. Whatever it was it was as close to final as I’d see without actually buying it from Amazon. After going through every menu I was a little disappointed. I think partly because the sample media that was on the device left much to be desired. Some of the “classics” they had on there were just daft. But nm. At this point I pretty much decided that I was going to post up a massive review of the Creative Zen PMC for all to read, complete with pictures, video and anything else I could come up with.
I plugged in the USB 2.0 cable into the Zen which connects at the bottom of the device into the front of my computer and was quite happy that that was it. I didn’t need to do anything else in terms of drivers or software. I’m running a MCE with SP2 and MP10 so the device just shows up under Audio Devices in My Computer as well as the new Portable Media Devices area in Control Panel. To my dismay however, the device doesn’t exactly work as just another external USB drive. This may or not matter to you but it can be annoying. The device has a Data and a Media Folder, the Media Folder has a Music, Pictures, TV, and Video folder. Plus a WMPInfo.xml file from WMP. If you want you can just copy media to each of the folders and that’ll work just fine. And if you want to store apps, Word docs, whatever, you can copy it to the Data folder. One thing that really doesn’t please me though is that you must copy the data back off the device to use it if you plug it into another computer. So for example… Say I’ve got this review which I’m writing in Word. I copy it to the PMC and take a flight over to Jon and plug the PMC into his system, I can’t just open up the Word doc from the device, do a quick edit and save. I must copy it off to his system, edit, save, then copy the doc back onto the PMC. This holds true with any file on the device. Double clicking any of the files on the device will give you the File Properties Dialog and some nice text that says “Files cannot be opened directly from this device. Please copy the file to a local folder and open the copy.” Personally I just fine this to be idiotic. But I’m sure Microsoft had its reasons, one of which was probably DRM related.
At first I was thinking that it was all a bit daft in terms of getting content onto the device. But I then popped open WMP10 and started going through my library. One of the new things you’ll see in the Library of WMP10 is that it doesn’t just have Music and Videos now. It’s got a whole lot more, you’ve got a place for TV, Pictures, Purchased music, etc. Plus devices like the Zen also show up under the Library. It’s really quite cool. The Library is probably one of the biggest improvements to WMP10 over 9. There are now two artist views for Music. One for Album Artist and one for Contributing Artist. This is great because many albums such as Santana’s Supernatural or Shaman have other artists that are either co-singers or are featured on a song, like P.O.D., Michelle Branch, or Rob Thomas. In WMP9 they’d all appear under Artists, which would end up being extremely annoying since you’d have to scroll through all those artists even if they were only featured on a single song. There’s also Composer, Rated, and Purchased Music section. Not to mention the Year Released section which was sort of available before if you installed them. The Purchased Music view makes it really easy to quickly see what you’ve purchased on Napster or MSN Music for example.
The All TV section of WMP10 is equally as impressive. In fact, it provides a much more informative view of TV than the MCE actually does. Obviously there’s a section for the series’, so I can easily see the two CSI’s, Futurama, and Family Guy. You’ve also got a section for programs that have not yet been viewed. Genre view, Date Recorded, and Rated TV as in star rating not parental guideline ratings. I also thought it was cool that there is an Actors view as well, which might come in handy. Under Videos, the main new thing is a Purchased Videos view, continuing to align WMP10 to online content services.
WMP10 can now also be used to organize all your pictures in the Library which is kind of cool. You can organize stuff by Event, the date the pictures were taken, and can also continue rating stuff and rate the pictures as well. I was a bit disappointed that WMP10 didn’t expose EXIF data in a sort of Advanced Tag Editor dialog like music has. Maybe for WMP11 
? Even without that, it’s still a pretty handy way of organizing all the main media a system might have.
So in WMP10 there really are two ways of actually syncing content to the device. Automatic mode and Manual mode. Automatic is new and is quite cool. I think while I personally might like to have some exact say in what goes onto the device WMP help you do a pretty good job of automatically getting stuff onto the device without any user involvement. There are too many options to choose from in terms of Automatic syncing to go over. But you’ve go all the different playlist options for music, adding stuff via ratings, fresh tracks, pictures taken in the last month, TV from the past week, etc etc. It really is quite extensive. To Manually get content on the device is equally as simple. You just go through your library right clicking and then going to Add to > Sync List. Or at the right side you switch to Sync List then just drag and drop. From there just press Start Sync. The Burn and Now Playing lists are also separated from the Sync list, and the entire list concept has undergone some major changes to fix annoyances caused by creating a massive list only to play some totally random file and losing that list.
You’ve also got some other options for the device and syncing. You can let WMP create a folder structure on the device for you automatically and can have it do a total ActiveSync type thing and start syncing everything when you plug it in. And finally under the quality tab there’s an option to not convert files. Granted this option applies to both Music and Video/TV at the same time, it should be a separate option for each. For example you can have WMP auto set the quality. You can set the bit rate you want for each. Or you can have it not convert at all. This is really handy for some people who have large devices say 5GB or larger. It’s pretty silly on these larger devices to convert a 192K WMA/MP3 down to 128K when you have all that room. Plus there’s a time factor in converting and this removes it. But like I said the option to convert or not is singular. So you can’t have it just convert TV automatically but not touch the Music.
There’s plenty of new features and updates in WMP10, a couple start to address my previous blog entry about WMP9. I’m not going to go too in depth yet about the new Media Player, that’ll be for another time. I should also note now that this is going to be the first part in a series of blogs about PMC’s, MCE *cough* and related, and WMP10. I’ve not go exact times for stuff like battery life and conversion times yet so that’ll be in the follow-up PMC blog.
Getting back on track now, I ended up adding about 14GB of actual content to the Sync List. That includes pictures, TV, video and music. I hit sync and minimized WMP10, a couple hours later it had converted everything and copied it to the device. It ended up only taking about 2GB on the device. So converting can come in handy.
I popped the headphones on, and started playing. The UI sounds have been borrowed from MCE as well which wasn’t predictable at all . I played my copy of the Dark Side SACD which was encoded with 90% VBR WMA. It sounded pretty darn good on the cheap little Creative headphones. Which, btw, have a really annoying cable. Where the line splits to each phone you’ve got one side longer than the other. But like I said, it sounded great, especially compared to my Sennheiser EH2270’s plugged directly into my MCE. Volume level was pretty good with the in the ear cans and I really couldn’t complain. I plugged in those EH2270’s and was even happier with the sound quality. Granted the little PMC can’t pump out enough power for these mighty Senn’s but fidelity and signal to noise was great. I unplugged the headphones expecting the tiny mono speaker to take over but it didn’t, instead the PMC auto mutes the device when unplugging the headphones, plus or minus depending on how you look at it I guess. Turning the sound up all the way, I was immediately disappointed. The sound is even worse than listening to the same track on my HP iPaq 5550. And can’t even hope compare to the sound coming from the Dell Inpsiron 8600 sitting next to it. While I’d imagine most will use the device with headphones or the A/V out, having a better speaker than the midget mono would’ve been greatly appreciated. I can’t overstate just how bad the speaker was on this Creative. I took it right outside my front door, there’s some construction going on about 400 yards away at this new student housing complex. Even with it being a quiet day there I couldn’t really make out anything in particular on Money. Just hi-end noise and that was it. With headphones of course all I heard was beautiful music so at least it’s got that.
Next thing while outside was the screen. They can range from 3.5 to 4” and have a standard 320x240 resolution. It looked just fine indoors, especially with the brightness turned all the way up. But even with the brightness set to its battery killing greatness, outside it left a lot to be desired. I walked over to the Blockbuster to grab another 3 DVD’s on the Movie Pass while watching Coral Reef Adventure. Still really happy with the sound quality and just totally guessing as to what was on the screen since I couldn’t actually see much but highlights. On the way back I walked a bit more slowly and played with the brightness levels including turning off the backlight and nothing really seemed to help. The quality of the screen outdoors really can’t compare to even the iPaq 5550 which I also had with me playing the same video. They could’ve done a much better job with this one. The other problem that I saw was that the device has a glass like reflective quality so I kept on getting reflections over the screen and that only made things worse.
Plugging in the handy little corded remote I tried out the FM features. The remote itself is quite small, the headphones plug into it like most other corded remotes. The controls are pretty easy to use, tactile feedback isn’t bad either. I found even with my big hands I could use it one or two handed. The LCD on the remote has a nice TReKiE blue backlight which is quite sexy. The text and such is a bit small and hard to read around the edges because the LCD is set into the remote so deeply. Bringing it closer to the plastic and removing some of the black border would resolve that. Sound quality remained good even with the headphones plugged into the remote and the actual cable length was also plenty long.
There’s also an IR remote, that might seem kind of odd, but it makes sense for when you’ve got the device plugged into a TV and are sitting back on the couch. It works quite well too. All of the controls are reproduced including the 4 presets at the top. I couldn’t actually find a way to customize these presets though. The remote is quite small, and was pleasant enough. It uses a standard 3V CR2025 battery and it’s easy enough to replace. The IR receiver on the unit is on the front of the device so when you’ve got it plugged in you’ll want the screen facing towards you and the remote.
I started browsing through all my pictures on the device and was quite pleased with the speed of the UI. Thanks to the 400MHz Intel XScale processor and 64MB RAM, I doubt anyone will have to be concerned about it. Even when I had close to 4,000 tracks on the device the Songs view only took about 8 seconds to load up the title of every one of those songs. There was no delay at all though with the Artists and Albums view. Very pleased indeed. One of the very cool things that I quickly got used to while using the device was the entire concept of what Microsoft calls “twist navigation”. The best way of describing it is this. You’ve got the top levels, My Music, My Pictures, etc. Then you go down into My Music, from there you’ve got at the top Artists, Albums, Songs, etc. You can either go left or right for that stuff. Or you can go down through the list of Albums which have album art when you scroll slowly and switch to the letter that you’re on when you scroll quickly. Say I go down to In Step by SRV. I can then go down again through the list of tracks on that album. But now at the top I’ve got the albums to the left and right. If I go left I’ve got How the West Was Won by Zeppelin, and In the Beginning to the right, another by SRV. The same thing holds true if you go to Artists. Go down to A Perfect Circle, to the left you’ve got “A”, to the right you’ve got Audioslave. If you go down to A Perfect Circle’s first album you’ve got all the tracks but can go left or right to the other album. You’ve got this entire twist navigation thing going on throughout the device except in the Settings. This is a real breakthrough on these small devices in terms of navigation. It really makes things really simple and easy to jump around through content.
So I started up some Cure to listen to while I browsed through the pictures. I’m not sure what I was expecting really since it’s almost exactly like MCE. The only real difference is that you’ve only got a fade transition and not some super almost intelligent moving picture and fade transition that MCE has. You can’t zoom in or move around as far as I can tell which is kind of a shame considering that Pictures are one thing that doesn’t get converted down to a smaller size. I’m kind of curious why since the display is 320x240, you’d think WMP10 would auto convert down to say 640x480 or 320x240 for each picture going on just to save space. While yeah, you might want to plug the device in elsewhere and view the originals, you’ve still got to copy them off the device. So at the moment all my pictures on the device are over a meg in size and 2272x1704, the default resolution from my Canon. Along the lines of having EXIF data in the library of WMP10, I would’ve liked to see some extra features for the pictures on the PMC that might give photographers reasons to drool. For example, if the device had a SD/CFII slot, you could pop the card into the device and automatically download all those photos to the device. There are some stand alone data storage devices but they’re ridiculously expensive for what they do. For example, Epson sells the P-1000 which holds 10GB (9GB available) and has a 3.7” 640x480 LCD with USB 1.1. But that runs $599, and while it does everything a digital photographer wants in external storage, it also costs a lot per GB and doesn’t do anything else. Who’s to say digital photographers don’t want to listen to some music while taking photos . A couple more features and a SD/CFII slot and the PMC would be great for them. A couple more cool suggestions which I like that came from other MVPs (Zarax, Jake Ludington, et al) gave were to give the device a better display and PowerPoint support. That way a professional could pop a PPT on the device, plug it into a digital projector through the A/V and use the IR remote to control the presentation instead of using a laptop. Zarax suggested Bluetooth support so that you could quickly move all the photos from a camera phone to the device. Diane Dumas suggested that GPS would also be really cool since the device has plenty of storage for maps of the entire planet. I think we pretty much all agreed that memory card slots and USB Host features would be really nice. At the same time there’s got to be a distinction here between a PMC and a PocketPC. Maybe at some point we’ll see some sort of convergence here.
When I was going through my music when I had 3968 tracks on it I really started noticing that unless I remembered the name of something there wasn’t a way for me to find it otherwise. You can’t really change the order stuff appears in, and you can’t make changes to any of the content or even delete the content from the device. This must all be done from a host system. Whether or not this matters is debatable.
In the Now Playing view you’ve got a couple of viewing options. My favorite is probably the view that gives you the album art, artist, album, track number, and track info all in one. This is definitely the best view. In another you’ve got the album art taking up almost the entire area, with just the track time and number as well. Next it slides over and half the album art is shown with a complete track listing and the track time showing for the currently playing track. Next you’ve still got half the album art but you can change the options, like repeat, shuffle, eq, rating, and purchase. The way I understand that purchase option is that it’s for when you’re renting music and like something enough to want to buy it. You check the box and WMP10 will go out and buy it. I’ve got to confirm this but that’s my current understanding since I can’t think of any other reason for it. Anyway the last view is a bit pointless imho, it’s only got the album info but no art, and is frankly quite boring. One of the cool things is when you’re in the half album art and track listing view. You can scroll up and down through not just that album but all the tracks on the PMC. I think for some they might be a bit disappointed that there aren’t any visuals, not even a spectrum analyzer visual. Any visuals like this would mean a battery trade off so it’s my only guess as to why they weren’t included.
With My Videos, you can sort things by Date or Name as well as a place for New stuff. There aren’t any thumbnails of the videos