Using the New Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Centers with Windows XP
Published: August 25, 2004
By Barb Bowman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
My first experience with portable music was a Channel Master transistor radio that I owned 40 years ago. It was the size of a brick and portable only because it had a strap. It played a few scratchy AM radio stations, it was the only way to listen to music on the go, and I carried it for many years.
Later, I bought a Sony Walkman and carried my cassette collection, then a Sony Discman and carried my CD collection. Now I have an MP3 player, plus I often carry my laptop so I can watch movies while I’m waiting in the airport and show off my digital photo collection when I’m visiting friends and family.
Portable Media Center Lightens My Load
Recently, I’ve had the chance to use one of the new Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Centers for a few weeks and realized that I’ve been searching for something like this most of my life.
Several consumer electronics companies, including Creative, Samsung, and iRiver, are releasing Portable Media Center devices. I’ve been using a Creative Zen Portable Media Center that Microsoft loaned to me.
For the first time, I can take all my digital entertainment with me – music, pictures, home videos, and even recorded TV shows - and I don't need a backpack full of CDs or cassettes. The Portable Media Center is about 3-by-6 inches, it weighs 15 ounces with the battery, and it holds a ton of music, pictures, and video, figuratively speaking. It is the perfect traveling companion.
My entire digital music collection ripped from about 200 CDs, about 400 of my best digital pictures, plus seven full-length movies and three episodes of a TV series that I’ve recorded with my Windows XP Media Center Edition-based home computer fit on this amazing device.
The Portable Media Center that I’ve been using has a 20-gigabyte (GB) hard drive. (Larger capacity Portable Media Centers will also be available.)
Portable Media Centers store and play back digital media files from your personal computer. You can use Portable Media Center with any version of Windows XP, including Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Tablet PC, or Windows XP Media Center Edition. You synchronize your media files using the new Windows Media Player 10, which is a free upgrade for your Windows XP-based computer.
Tip: If you’ve been running the Windows Media Player 10 beta, be sure to uninstall the beta version, restart your computer, uninstall the runtime, and then reboot again before you install the new version.
The types of digital media that you can synchronize and take with you on the Portable Media Center include:
| • | Music files in WMA or MP3 format (either copied from CDs or downloaded online). |
| • | Digital pictures in JPEG format. |
| • | Recorded TV from a Windows XP Media Center Edition-based computer. On a Windows XP Media Center Edition system, Windows Media Player 10 can discover all your recorded TV files that are stored in Microsoft’s DVR-MS format and convert them in the background to a much smaller file size by transcoding them to the WMV file format. |
| • | Digital video. Your home movies and presentations that you create with Windows Movie Maker, Photostory or other programs. |
You can transfer most common video formats to your Portable Media Center. Windows Media Player 10 transcodes the files, or reformats the video so it can play on the Portable Media Center platform and screen size.
As a general rule of thumb, if Windows Media Player 10 can play your video file, it should be able to transfer it to a Portable Media Center. However, the capability for Windows Media Player 10 to transcode some file types, including AVI and MPEG2, depends on the type of encoder that you have on your computer.
There are many ways that you can build a digital video collection. Some programs, such as Emuzed’s Movie Mill or Hauppage’s Win-TV PVR software, can record TV to your hard drive in MPEG or AVI format. Windows Media Player 10 can transcode and synchronize these files to a Portable Media Center.
I own an older Dazzle DV Video Bridge that I’ve used to digitize old home movies. I plan to copy some of these movies to my Portable Media Center. (Pinnacle Systems now offers newer Dazzle products that can save MPEG, AVI, and Windows Media files to your hard drive. You can enjoy these on a Portable Media Center.)
There are Internet sites that offer content in downloadable format such as AVI, MPEG, or WMV. I’m a Trekkie and have often downloaded movie trailers of Star Trek movies. Trailers World offers some Star Trek Nemesis video trailers in AVI or MPEG format that I can download and synchronize with my Portable Media Center.
I've also learned that some TV capture programs such as Snapstream's Beyond TV 3 will begin to have Portable Media Center profiles available that put recorded TV shows into a format that you can transfer directly to a Portable Media Center.
Easy-to-Use Design of the Portable Media Centers
Portable Media Centers have a highly intuitive user interface. The design is based on Windows XP Media Center Edition’s “10-foot” interface – which was designed to make it easy to use your computer with a remote control on your sofa from 10 feet away.
The Green Button displays the Start menu on the Portable Media Center, similar to the Windows XP Media Center Edition. These will be the same on all Portable Media Centers from differing manufactures. Volume controls, forward, rewind, stop, pause, and power on/off may vary between devices, but they are highly intuitive and work just like the controls on your VCR or DVD player.
When you press the Start menu button, the Portable Media Center Start menu is displayed and you see the following options:
| • | my tv –TV shows originally recorded in DVR-MS format. |
| • | my music – your digital music files that you’ve synchronized on the Portable Media Center. |
| • | my pictures – digital pictures that you’ve synchronized on the Portable Media Center. |
| • | my videos – video content (not TV shows) on the Portable Media Center. |
| • | settings – various settings for sound, the display on the device, the display on a connected TV, international settings, and so forth. |
If I’m viewing my digital pictures and press the Start button, the Start menu is displayed over the picture. Figure 1 below shows the hardware button and navigation controls and the Start menu.
Figure 1: The Start menu for the Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center.
I’m a shutterbug and have gone totally digital with my cameras. I’m currently using a Nikon D70 and a compact flash card reader to save all my pictures to my home computer.
I now have a huge collection of digital pictures on my computer, including a family album of pictures going back 100 years that I created by scanning old pictures and documents. I’ve often invited friends over to see my pictures from flower shows, kayak races, and fall foliage treks.
My best images can now travel with me as a kind of instant traveling portfolio on the Portable Media Center. Similar to the thumbnail view on my home Windows XP Media Center Edition PC, if I want to find and display a single digital image, a handy, sortable thumbnail view is displayed, see Figure 2 below. I can scroll through the thumbnails and when the image you want to display is highlighted, press OK.
Figure 2: The thumbnail view for digital media files on the Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center.
One of the really cool features of the PMC lets you start a slide show with music accompaniment. I love starting a slideshow and handing headphones to a friend. Friends are pretty amazed, and I have to admit, I’m impressed with this feature. Here’s how to do this on a Portable Media Center:
1. | Press the Green Button to display the Start menu. |
2. | Select my music. |
3. | Use the left and right cursor keys to scroll through the albums, artists, and playlists and select music. |
4. | Press OK after you select the music that you want to play. |
5. | Press the Start button again (the music continues to play). |
6. | Select my pictures and then press OK |
7. | Select Play Slide Show, then press OK. (If you want to play a slide show of pictures that are in a specific folder, select my pictures, then select the folder, and then click Play Slide Show.) |
Tip: You can use the back arrow button on the device to navigate backwards without interrupting the music.
Barb Bowman enjoys sharing her own experiences and insights into today's leading edge technologies. She is a product development manager for Comcast High-Speed Internet, but her views here are strictly personal.
