Portable Media Buying Guide
by Sam Chow
copyright © 2005 Future Shop
Portable Media Players and Portable Media Centers are two similar devices that both allow you to enjoy your digital content on the go. Both are portable, and both will give you the freedom to take your audio, video and digital photos with you on the road. This Buying Guide will help you identify what the differences are between the two types of devices before you make your choice.
Portable Media Player (PMP)
A Portable Media Player is similar to a hard drive based MP3 player, except that they also allow you to watch movies in addition to listening to audio files. They have a built in colour LCD screen not only for file navigation but also to watch video content. These devices can also be used to view digital images or to store data from your computer. Size and features vary between the various players, with some having expansion slots for media cards like the ones found in digital cameras. Portable Media Players can pretty much do everything an MP3 player can do and more. You can think of them as the big brother to the MP3 player.
Portable Media Center (PMC)
If you have heard of Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, then it may come as no surprise that Portable Media Centers were designed to work seamlessly with this version of Windows. The main difference between Media Players and Media Centers is that Media Centers meet specifications outlined by Microsoft. And use Microsoft's operating system (OS) designed for small devices called Windows Mobile. Instead of using special software, synchronizing your media library to the PMC is done through Microsoft Windows Media Player 10. Using an OS and software that is familiar to many people makes it a bit easier when you're learning how to use the player. There is even a Windows key on PMCs that opens the main menu when pressed, much like the Start Button in PC versions of Windows.
Storage Capacity
Storage capacity of the hard drive based units iusually starts at 20GB. 20GB will allow you approximately 320 hours of music at near CD quality (128kbps MP3s) or approximately 35 hours of video at VCD/MPEG-1 quality. If you use more advanced compression types, such as WMA (Windows Media Audio), for audio or video, or DivX, for video, these figures can go even higher while still maintaining a fairly good quality.
For the players that have an expansion slot, you can instantly add up to 1GB of storage via a memory card. An expansion slot is also handy for viewing photos taken from your digital camera. Simply take out the memory card from your camera and pop it into the media player to view, be sure to double check that the media card used in your digital camera is compatible with your Portable Media Player or Center.
Size and Weight
While these devices are portable, do not think of them as being something you can put in your pocket and walk around with. In order to watch videos, the screen on the player has to be a reasonable size, which also adds to the overall size of the player. Since battery requirements are also higher for playing back video, this is also made bigger. Both larger screen and larger battery add considerably to the weight and size of the device. Roughly speaking, expect Portable Media Players and Centers to be twice the size and twice the weight of hard drive-based MP3 players. The screen size on these players is generally about 3.5 inches (measured diagonally).
File Types
Both types of players will generally support the more common formats, such as MP3 and WMA audio formats as well as WMV (Windows Media Video),and MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 for video. For image files, JPEG is the most common, although some will support BMP (Bitmap) images as well. Other popular format types to watch for are DVR-MS (Microsoft Recorded TV Show File), DivX (MPEG-4)/AVI videos, and MP3Pro audio files. While it is always nice to have a player that supports more types of formats since you will not be able to play files that are not supported, certain types may not be essential if you never use them. In addition, you can usually re-encode unsupported files to something the player can support, although this can take a bit of time, depending on how fast your computer is, and may degrade the quality.
If you buy digital music or video downloads, check to see that the player is SDMI Compliant (Secure Digital Music Initiative). An SDMI compliant player will allow you to enjoy your downloads that contain Digital Rights Management (DRM), which restrict you to how many times you can copy a downloaded file. Portable Media Centers and Windows Media Player will support copy restrictions on Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video file, making it easy for you to transfer the files as well as licensing rights to your player. Without SDMI support, DRM files cannot be played back.
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