Zen Portable Media Center

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Zen Portable Media Center

zen A Reuters article pointed me to Amazon taking $499 pre-orders for Creative's 20Gb portable media center device. The portable device will play Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Image, MP3, JPEG, and TIFF files. It'll sync with a computer running any version of XP, but if you've got Media Center Edition running, you'll be able to transfer shows directly over to the portable device.

This new Creative unit is the first product that MS hinted at early this year. It'll be interesting to see how well it does in the marketplace. The price is kind of high and since you're locked into using Windows Media Video instead of Microsoft's own AVI, DivX, and/or MPEG, I'm curious if there are enough legitimate users of wmv to create a market for this. I bet if the device played more video and audio formats (why not add ogg support?), they'd sell more.

by Matt Haughey July 9, 2004 in News

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OK, to get the TV shows on the handheld, do you have to have a Media Center PC or can you use a product like SnapStream and convert TV shows to WMV and then drag them over to the player. Article almost sounds like the TV show feature is proprietary to Media Centers PCs.

Posted by: jss92 at Jul 9, 2004 3:14:01 PM

I would hope that it will allow you to slide snapstream's wmv files over to it, but we won't know until it comes out I guess.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 9, 2004 4:13:08 PM

This is great, except that Microsoft should fix its existing technology first.

I use SnapStream PVR, and I like to copy movies in WMV format to my Axim. It works great, except that it is an absolute pain to fast forward and reverse for playback.

Posted by: Benjamin Hoppe at Jul 10, 2004 6:19:54 PM

Holy cow man! Where's the connectivity? Just USB 2.0?

Where is the Wi-Fi? I need to be able to listen to Internet Streaming Radio in Starbucks.

I need the 40 GB 1.8 inch hard drive in a full PDA form factor... This is too specialized in functionality.

Posted by: Joshua Hayworth at Jul 11, 2004 5:23:17 PM

I just posted some new pics I took of it http://www.devbuzz.com/content/pmppics_pg1.asp . There are also a bunch more here http://www.devbuzz.com/content/init_personal_media_center.asp

As far as TV goes, no You don't need a Television. Also, all you need is ActiveSync and Windows Media Player 10. No wifi yet, but the next version will have the Common Language runtime in it (I thinkthis one does too but it's not exposed publicly) so you can write your own apps. Remember this is just GenI of these guys, there's plenty more to come.

Posted by: William Ryan at Jul 13, 2004 10:39:53 PM

Thanks for posting those pics William. I had no idea the units were so small. They look a lot cooler and more portable than I thought they'd be.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 14, 2004 5:09:17 PM

they all support 320x240 resolution, same as pocket pcs, buy a pocket pc with a big sd ram and you can do the same thing. a movie with crispy quality at 320x240 is about 400Mb, and a photo at 320x240 is about 30kb so with a memory card of 512Mb you can have a movie and hundrends of photos with your pocket pc that does other things also. so why buy this device?

Posted by: tsilk at Jul 19, 2004 11:04:17 AM

OMG BECAUSE THIS CAN STORE A WHOLE LOT MORE AND A FUCKING 512 CARD ISNT EXACTLY FREE EITHER. 20 GIGS WORTH? THINK ABOUT THAT... DIVX and tons of other programs ohh and RCA has one just like this but its 100 bucks cheaper...and I liked the
RCA LYRA HDD 20 gig mp3 player... its just the same thing with a screen (and a dev team already working on full divx/mpeg/avi/ogg support becuase of the similarities to that of the all in one media programs already out there for palm
and pocket pc. and at 400 ... with same res...its gonna rock. Ohh and 20 gigs worth of sd ram cards at the cheapest price would cost more than this. And can you imagine carying 40 sd ram cards around... so once again I wonder if the person who posted above me actually has a brain... I dont think he does...

Posted by: John at Jul 25, 2004 10:18:49 AM

sorry mate... i didn't realize that you want to carry 100 movies with you... you are right, it can be handy if you get lost in the mountains and you have to wait two months untill they rescue you... but even in this situation, the battery will last 3 hours... as for the rca thingy... here, see what crap it is...
http://www.2iba.com/a/B00008VFCU/RCA-Lyra-Audio-slash-Video-20-GB-Jukebox.html

anyway... here is my question to you all: how many times per month you have two free hours in order to watch a movie, two free hours that you are not at home i mean, because if you are at home and watch movies from the portable thein hey, you are a weirdo so i rest my case...

Posted by: tsilk at Aug 8, 2004 3:26:45 PM

I work on the team that's building the portable media center software. I'm biased as you might guess and think it's a great product--I've been using mine everyday since about June. I'm using the creative labs Zen, and the battery life is more than terrific--it's unbelievable. The goal was 4h of video; and in practice it actually does about 6 for me. Audio is around 15hrs or so. In terms of getting content onto the device, I use with Media Center and it is a very sweet and easy experience. The media player 10 will transcode video into a format for the PMC--this means, assuming you have say intervideo's mpeg 2 decoder (which you have if you have their dvd playback software) the player will automatically transcode mpeg2 to wmv in the proper format for the PMC. A simple rule of thumb is, if you can get it in the windows media library you can get it on the PMC. Same is true for all your digital pictures and music.

Posted by: Inside guy at Aug 8, 2004 11:20:00 PM

tsilk shows a lack of imagination. The beauty of being able to store that much data is that you have a portable library of favourite shows, movies and music (heck, even home videos of wife and kids) to bring with you wherever you go. In the car, on the plane and in hotel rooms when what's on the telly just doesn't appeal to you. The fact that it has external connectors means that you aren't just limited to the small lcd that it comes with. With something like this, I could create a library of my all time favourite stuff and have it follow me wherever I go.

Posted by: Pseudomonas at Aug 17, 2004 6:50:18 AM

I hope to be able to Listen to Internet radio
with the Media Player,when that comes out.

Posted by: Danny Marchand at Aug 23, 2004 7:34:03 PM

hi guys,

just wondering what is inside the PMC? Is it an Intel general purpose chip?

thanks.

Posted by: c64addict at Aug 23, 2004 8:27:54 PM

So, when will there be a 40 or 80 gig version? 20 gigs for a video device? Seems pretty tiny!!! Is it a size issue? A battery issue? They (Creative) make much larger disc size audio-only players. I'll wait for the 80 gig version.

Posted by: Jeff at Aug 29, 2004 11:16:13 AM

Also, what's up with Amazon? They say they don't carry it and to look elsewhere for it. Is it shipping or has it been pulled?

Posted by: Jeff at Aug 29, 2004 11:18:49 AM

I am curious if they are using the same HD as in the Zen Jukebox MP3 players. If it is, would a simple swap of that drive into the media center be possible? I have the 60gig model and 20 gigs seems awfully small if they are going to bill it as all media player.

Posted by: James Childress at Aug 30, 2004 11:51:50 PM

does anyone know when this is going to be released? i just pre-ordered one from Amazon

Posted by: Mike at Sep 1, 2004 9:43:53 PM

It's released .. Best Buy in the States has them but not putting them out until this weekend. I knew they had them and bought one today.

Funny thing is, I don't know if I want to keep it. It has been sitting next to me for 2 hours now, completely unopened and unwrapped. I'm about to sell my Archos AV320 and realize that I'm giving up the ability to record to a device directly and giving up the ability to copy digi photos while on the go through a CF card interface.

This doesn't sound like a good tradeoff for a device that only makes it easier for someone fearful of video converting software to get a video onto the device. I think I'm going to wait for one a bit more robust - more interface options.

Posted by: David at Sep 3, 2004 2:05:07 PM

Does anyone have the specs on how EXACTLY to encode video for a PMC? I have the Creative Zen and I've been trying to test it out. I realize that I can drop video into the MP10 and it will convert it to the PMC format for me automatically, but I create my own videos and films and I want to be able to encode it right away, instead of encoding twice when I want to drop it on the PMC. I can save a WMV file straight from Premiere Pro. I've tried it with several different quality settings... all at 320x240, 30 fps. And when I use MP10 to COPY it onto the player, instead of converting it AGAIN, it has always given me an "unplayable" error. This is frustrating. Do I HAVE to use MP10 to re-convert all my videos??

Posted by: SisXtian at Sep 16, 2004 6:01:20 PM

use windows media encoder, encode the file at 320 by 240. video at 500KBPS 30FPS and audio at 128KBPS.

Posted by: jagr at Oct 18, 2004 10:15:11 PM

i need some info on how to convert my own music videos to my pmc. because my media player 10 is no doing it

Posted by: Rogelio Mitchell at Apr 27, 2005 3:35:23 AM

I love my Creative Zen PMC. But it has very early software (version is 0.0.0). I think it was a prototype at sometime. So, it has some limitations -- it won't display out to a TV for instance.

Does anyone know how I can upgrate the Firmware? (The normal downloads from Creative don't work).

Zozo

Posted by: Zozohead at Aug 23, 2005 3:45:33 PM

we should be able to play basic games, such as, solitare and ect...

Posted by: Jungho at Oct 26, 2005 1:49:51 PM

I have a Creative vision 30 gig PMC Im trying to find where and how to download and install tv shows and dvds to the device. I hope it will be easy because I don't want to buy an IPOD.

Posted by: Matthew.S at Oct 3, 2006 5:58:14 AM

Zen Portable Media Center

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