With several video based portable players springing up, Creative plan on releasing
its version known as the
This features a 3.8" TFT colour display, 20 GB HDD capacity, Lithium Ion Battery and uses the Microsoft Portable Media Center Platform. However unlike most other players, this player will only function with Windows XP which is likely due to enhanced DRM limitations in XP. This player was unveiled in January at CeBIT and is due to ship this fall.
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Now that Archos has proved there is a market other are jumping in. Several manufacturers already have flash-based portable MPEG-4 units like Sony, but these players only come with 128MB of memory and thus can't hold an entire movie at any reasonable quality compression rate. Jukebox video units with 20GB of memory are the draw and Creative Labs is the latest to enter with a player. The Creative Zen Portable Multimedia Center was unveiled last January at CeBIT and is due to ship this fall. The unit's stats plays off favorable to the excellent Archos AV300 series. The Zen Portable Multimedia Center comes with a 20 GB hard drive. Utilizing the Windows® Media Center Edition interface the player uses Microsoft's implementation of MPEG-4. As of this writing, the player only operates with Windows XP (which has Microsoft's full DRM capabilities), a sign of capitulation to the movie industry that wishes to put locks on how users view digital movies. The unit plays Windows Media Video 7, 8 and 9 and Windows Media Audio 8, along with MP3 files. The unit can also display still photographs in the JPEG and TIFF formats. Read the full article here. |
The player looks more like a handheld game console to me ;) It will be interesting to see what other specifications it has such as battery life, video capture specifications and screen resolution. While these video players may appear to be the replacement for the handheld DVD player, just note that DVDs must be converted first to be able to watch them on a portable unit and also due to the DMCA legislation, it is unlikely Microsoft will ever offer its own software to do the conversion.
Source: MP3 newswire.net
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http://tinyurl.com/3ev7s
[i]File transfer is done exclusively through Windows Media Player - you can't just drag and drop files over using Windows Explorer, so using it as a hard disk is out of the question. This is primarily to stick with Microsoft's commitment to DRM (Digital Rights Management) - every file has to be verified to ensure the track has been purchased, not downloaded illegally. Different rules will obviously apply to recorded television programs, though exactly what these will be are as yet undisclosed. [/i]
May be a bad mistake for Creative. . .
[edited by seanbyrne on 01.06.2004 15:01]
You can access the hard drive directly from Windows, but you can not add music that way. You can not easliy copy music from the Ipod to your computer and I don't think you can do it at all with protected tracks purchased from iTunes. All music must be added through iTunes, but it does not attempt to verify uprotected content. You can transfer any mp3 or wav file through iTunes without a hassle. I believe you can do the same with unprotected aac files, but it only works well with quicktime aac files. I could not get it to work with outer aac encoders, but I did not try very hard. The files should have id3 tags so their names will appear correctly on the ipods screen.
There are programs (legal or illegal?) that will allow you to more easliy remove music from an ipod, but I have never tried them. Check out www.ipoding.com for more information.
