There’s a tendency in the technology industry to think that, just because a product can be built, it should be built, even if all the necessary pieces to make it a success aren’t in place. Sometimes these premature products eventually become hits. Sometimes they just fail.
It’s too early to know which of those fates awaits the latest premature tech device: the handheld, hard-disk-based video player. But one thing is certain. It’s not ready for prime time yet.
The most prominent hand-held video player is the Portable Media Center, a design dreamed up by Microsoft and built, with different hardware designs, by three companies so far – Samsung, Creative Labs and iRiver.
The PMCs, which cost around $500, play back music and display photos. But their big claim to fame is that they can play videos – even full-length TV shows and movies – transferred from a Windows PC using Microsoft’s new, free, Windows Media Player 10 software.
They are meant to compete with laptops and portable DVD players for watching video on planes or in the back seat of cars.
I’ve been testing the Samsung and Creative PMCs with two Windows PCs – a standard Windows XP model and the new HP Media Center PC, which can receive and record TV programs.
The Samsung is a slim, light, silvery device that measures about 4 inches wide and long, and under an inch thick. The Creative is a thick, heavy rectangular black brick that’s more than 40 percent larger and 50 percent heavier than the Samsung. Both have 20-gigabyte hard disks and bright, but small, color screens under 4 inches in size when measured diagonally.
I preferred the design of the Samsung, which includes a speaker and a built-in stand, accessories the Creative lacks. But the Creative has a removable battery, while the Samsung’s is sealed in. And the Creative boasts better battery life – seven hours of video playback, compared with three for the Samsung.
Based on my tests, I can’t recommend either player for mainstream, nontechie users. This is not so much because of the design of the players themselves. It’s because there’s so little video content available to play on them, and Microsoft’s software does a poor job of transferring commercial content to the players.
By the time Apple’s iPod music player arrived three years ago, there were tens of millions of songs in the open MP3 format already stored on computer hard disks around the world. Most of these were downloaded from Web sites later ruled illegal, or copied from CDs people already owned.
No such situation exists for the digital video that might fill up a Portable Media Center. Illegal downloading of movies and TV shows has been much less popular than illegal music downloads. And unlike CDs, DVDs are copy protected, so far fewer people have copied movies to their computers than copied music.
At the moment, the main types of video files available for transfer to a portable media center are home videos stored on a computer; free video clips downloaded from the Internet; TV shows recorded on the tiny percentage of all PCs capable of recording TV; and videos you can purchase from the online stores of Major League Baseball and a movie-downloading company called CinemaNow.
Baseball’s MLB.com site offers videos of games and a few longer original videos. The CinemaNow site offers just 190 downloadable films for playback on Portable Media Centers. The selection is terrible, mostly obscure titles such as “Shopping for Fangs” and “Redboy 13.”
Microsoft hopes to announce some additional paid sources of video content early next year. But for now, you’re stuck with old baseball and bad movies.
In my tests, I was able to transfer free video clips to the two players just fine. I was also able to record TV shows on the Media Center PC and transfer these to the PMCs just fine. All played back crisply and well.
But you must have a relatively expensive Media Center PC or costly and tricky add-on gear to record programs that can be used on a PMC. You can’t transfer recorded programs from a TiVo or other set-top digital video recorder.
To test the playback of copy-protected, legal downloads, I bought and downloaded a movie and five baseball videos and then tried to transfer them to the two PMCs. Using the standard PC, none of these downloaded files would transfer to the Creative player – even after I tweaked the PC according to Microsoft’s instructions. Two of the baseball clips, but nothing else, transferred successfully to the Samsung.
From the Media Center PC, I was able to get one baseball clip onto the Samsung but no legally downloaded files at all onto the Creative.
I had a similarly bad experience a few months back using the same software to transfer commercially downloaded music to a different player. I can only conclude that Microsoft still hasn’t been able to get its software to work properly with all copy-protected media files.
So unless you’re a techie or a hopeless gadget freak, stay away from the Portable Media Centers for now. If you want a portable video device, you’re better off buying a portable DVD player. They can be bought for half the price or less, come with larger screens, and are able to draw from an almost unlimited selection of content.
Walter Mossberg writes about personal technology for The Wall Street Journal.
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