I spent some time working with one of the new portable video players on the market late last night. Here’s a product with the right idea and the wrong execution. It seems promising enough. 20 gigabytes of disk space, nice 3.5 inch color screen, USB 2.0 and 3.5 to 4 hours of battery life when watching video. Then I actually used it. First step, plugging it in. Nice, Windows XP recognizes it as a USB 2.0 device. I quickly copy 8 gig of music and 2 gig of photos. Total time, about 10 minutes which is nice. Look at some photos. My old photos from 1995 at VGA resolution look fine and load fast. Fast forward loading a few 4 MP shots. SLOOOOOW. I am watching the screen re-draw line by line. Totally useless as a photo album for hi res shots. I’d have to down sample 5,000 pictures for this feature to be of any use. Music plays well. All the ID3 tags are there. So let’s try and browse by artist. Nope. Genre? Nope. Album? Nope. Best I can do is the explorer like interface to see the physical layout of my music and build play lists on the fly. How very 1998 but not very useful with 2,000 songs. OK, let me go into a folder and listen to an album (yes, I still call them that). Great, there’s my music but it’s alphabetical. I guess I can re-build every album play list but that’s more work than I want to do. Finally I try video. This I knew would be tricky as the player only supports DiVX files in .AVI format. The player comes with a program called Virtual Dub that will transcode MPG and AVI files to DiVX but I need the DiVX codecs first. Yikes, DiVX is free but only if you let them install lots of adware on your machine. I finally realize I only need the codecs not the program and download. I have an MP3 encoder on the system, so I’m good to go there. I get up and running but all my content is in WMV format having been recorded from Media Center PCs. A few Google clicks and I have a solution to transcode all my WMV into .AVI (but not DiVX  format) and then from there I can use the tools that came with the player. Time to transcode a one hour TV show was two hours and fifteen minutes. There’s no way to automate this process so it’s not likely anyone will ever do this on a regular basis. Wait, doesn’t the new version of Snapstream autotranscode into DiVX. A quick look their website says it does. I quickly pull out a Snapstream machine and swap it in for the MCE and upgrade. Record the show in MPEG2 format and it as advertised autotranscodes into DiVX. The process takes about 10 minutes for the show and if it does this in the background automatically after recording could be a viable solution even with manual synch of content. I copy over the file and…. It doesn’t work. Video is fine for about two seconds and then breaks up. Rather badly. Two hours of messing with different recording settings in WMV and MPG and different transcoded settings for DiVX yield nothing. I might add this seems to be a player issue as the files played just fine on my PC. All were done to what the player asked for 320x240 or 640x480 video encoded with MP3 soundtracks. Snapstream does auto encode to WMV very nicely for PocketPC playback  but nothing I could do could get the proper results.

Bottom line, there’s a market for video and photo added to music but it must be done right.

1.      First, music which is a core feature must be at least as good as what today’s standard is. That’s the iPod and this device didn’t come close to the flexibility the iPod has with playing back music.

2.      Photos must be optimized for portable viewing. There’s a lot of ways to do this including proxies and auto encoding. But it needs to be done.

3.      Video needs to be transcoded to be viable but it needs to be device optimized and the hardware and software for content need to know about each other. It also needs to be automatic. As soon as I had to go hunting for codecs and transcoders I knew this wasn’t going to work.