June 19th, 2006
Jason Dunn
Engadget has a report and some photos of the new Philips Portable Media Center, dubbed the PMC7230. According to the Engadget report, it’s going to have a 30 GB hard drive, a 3.5 inch 320 x 240 display, a kickstand on the back, and will be PlaysForSure compatible. It will apparently sell for $349 USD, which is better than the $500 price point the first generation units were at, but there’s not a lot that impresses me about this unit. Where’s the memory card slot? Being able to dump photos from a SecureDigital or CompactFlash card into the PMC is one of the killer scenarios offered by second generation PMCs, and this thing certainly looks big enough to handle a memory card slot of some sort. I continue to believe that the PMC has great potential, but so far it doesn’t seem like any of the OEMs other than Toshiba are willing to really push the boundaries beyond what we saw in the first generation units - though the LG also looks slick. This week I’ll be profiling the forthcoming second-generation Portable Media Centers.
June 17th, 2006
Jason Dunn
If you’re beta testing Windows Vista, this update will interest you:
“Tonight, a update to Windows Vista Beta 2’s Windows Mobile Device Center has gone up on Windows Update. This update gives the Windows Mobile Device Center full capability of syncing your Windows Mobile Phone or Device with Outlook. It even supports OneNote 2007 Mobile as well. It offers an impressive UI arrangement giving you full access to syncing your device and accessing its files. It even tells you how many images you have on your Mobile Device when you move your mouse over “Photos, Music and Video”. I’m certainly impressed with this update and expect it will only get better here on out.”
There’s been a lot of confusion around Vista, the Mobile Device Center, and ActiveSync - and I can’t say that I understand it fully myself. I believe what’s going to happen is that ActiveSync as a stand-alone client is going to fade away, and every copy of Windows Vista is going to have this Mobile Device Center built in. It will be used for everything from MP3 players to Pocket PCs - and the really impressive part is that if every install of Vista will have it, that means you can conceivably sync your Windows Mobile device with any computer running Windows Vista. That’s something I’ve wanted to see happen for a long time, and it’s finally going to be a reality - if I understand all this properly. 
I’m running a beta of Vista myself, but I haven’t booted it up in a couple of weeks, nor have I installed this update. Have you? How’s it working for you so far?
June 16th, 2006
Jason Dunn
Reader Chas Williamson sent me a question via email that I thought was worth answering on the site. And it kicks off a new category of content on this site, answering reader email. Here’s what Chas is wondering about:
“I find it quite frustrating that, even with the iPaq 4705 running WM5 and other machines, I cannot get larger images in Windows Media Player. I have the Weather Channel on right now, and it has a 1 inch by 0.75 inch size (roughly). Try pressing “Full Screen”, and the only difference is that the same size image is turned on its side without anything else on the screen. It is certainly nothing like “Full Screen”. This problem happens in Smartvideo, VDC, Pocket Streamer de Luxe, direct download from a streaming web site. I would like to get a decent sized image taking up the whole (beautiful) screen. With the modern lovely machines costing a lot, and with all of the technology, why is something so simple made so hard?”
Chas’ frustration isn’t a new one - when the first VGA device hit the market in 2005, the Dell Axim X51v, one of the first things I tried with it was to watch a video clip. The video clip was 320 x 240 in size, and my expectation was that it would scale up to full screen - it didn’t. I did some investigating and the reason why Windows Media Player 10 Mobile doesn’t scale the video upwards is performance. There are 400% more pixels in VGA (307,200 pixels) than QVGA (76,800 pixels). The developer I spoke to said that the Pocket PC didn’t have enough CPU power to scale 320 x 240 video up 400% bigger - at least not without significant updates to Windows Media Player 10 Mobile. We’ve had VGA devices on the market now for almost a year, and unfortunately no update to WMP10 Mobile has been released. Thankfully, other developers have stepped up to the plate with solutions. (more…)
June 12th, 2006
Jason Dunn
The choice of MP3 or WMA depends on what you want to do with the files – modern software for video and audio editing can deal with WMA as easily as MP3, so the real question is what your audio player can handle. All Windows Mobile players obviously support WMA – in fact, basically every audio player on the planet supports WMA, except the most popular one of all: the iPod (what’s really interesting is that the chipset does support WMA, but Apple disables it). If you want to have the flexibility to get an iPod in the future, rip to MP3. If you could care less, WMA is fine. And WMA will also save you space – you can generally go down one or two notches in bit rate with WMA and have it sound just as good. So if you decided that a 192kbps MP3 sounded perfect, a 160kbps or 128kbps WMA will likely sound nearly identical – but with smaller file size.
But what if I were to tell you that having the best of both worlds was possible? Windows Media Player 10 has a really cool feature that many people don’t know about – it’s called per-device transcoding. The word “transcoding” simply means to take something in one format and re-encode it in another format. So taking an MP3 and turning it into a WMA is transcoding. Where this becomes useful is when you want to rip your CDs in one format, but listen to them on your Windows Mobile device in another format.
So, for example, let’s say that you decide you want to rip your CDs in MP3 format for maximum flexibility, and at 320 kbps because you want insanely high quality. Done and done – Windows Media Player will do that for you. But here’s the cool part – you can tell it to automatically convert those big MP3 files to much smaller low-bit rate WMA files to save space. This is especially important if you don’t have much storage space on your audio player – it can make the difference between getting 30 songs on your player, or getting 180 songs on there. As an example, my wife uses a Dell Ditty, a small and very basic audio player with 512 MB of storage space. She uses it at the gym, so audio quality isn’t that important. When I performed the procedure below, the number of songs she was able to keep on the Ditty went up by 500%. She has much more musical variety, and hasn’t complained about the sound quality. (more…)
June 9th, 2006
Jason Dunn
In previous posts I’ve talked about bit rate and compression as they relate to Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 files, so here’s where it comes together into and becomes useful. A common misconception I run into very frequently on this subject is people who say “WMA files are half the size of MP3 files”. That’s only true if the WMA file is half the bit rate of the MP3. Confused? Here’s the breakdown.
One of the advantages that WMA, OGG, and other modern audio formats have is that they have more efficient compression models - meaning they do a better job of retaining song quality with less data. If you were to rip a song from a CD to a 64kbps WMA and a 64kbps MP3, the WMA would sound significantly better because it’s more effective at removing data from the song while still retaining what matters (is that psychoacoustic thing again). When WMA was first introduced, Microsoft made some comparisons between WMA and MP3, and declared that a 64kbps WMA sounded as good as a 128bps MP3. And since 64kbps is half the bit rate of 128kbps, guess what that means? The WMA is half the size of the MP3, and if the sound quality is the same, the you end up with the idea that WMA files are half the size of MP3s. Whether or not a 64kbps WMA sounds as good as a 128kbps MP3 is certainly debatable – it depends on the song, the headphones/speakers used, and most important of all, the ears of the person listening.
So what bit rate and file format should you rip your CDs to? The answer is a bit nebulous: it depends. It you want to take the easiest route, rip at 256kbps MP3. Why? 256kbps is a high bit rate that will retain the vast majority of the original song’s quality. MP3 is the most universal format – every player out there supports it. And this happens to be the format that I currently rip in. Not good enough for you? Ok, then you should do some experiments to figure out the best format for you. Take a CD with a song on it that you know really well, and rip it to the following formats:
64 kbps WMA
96 kbps WMA
128 kbps MP3
160 kbps WMA
256 kbps MP3
Give the song a listen with some headphones, ideally the same set you’re going to use with your audio device. Listen closely to each file, starting with the 64kbps WMA. If you hear distortions in the audio (listen for the swish of drum cymbals in particular), or if it just doesn’t sound good to you, move up to the next highest bit rate until you find one that sounds great. Listen to the one lower in bit rate to confirm that it really does sound worse to you, and the next higher bit rate to confirm that it doesn’t sound any better. And there you have it: you’ve picked your preferred bit rate! If you want to be extra thorough, take your preferred bit rate audio file, and listen to it on your PC speakers as well. Burn that track to a CD and put it in your car – listen to it everywhere to make sure the quality is high enough. If you don’t want to go through the work of ripping files, Microsoft has an audio quality comparison page where they’ve ripped the same CD track at various bit rates.
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