Thursday, December 15, 2005
Mobius 2005: Portable Media Center v2.0 (Revenge of the PMC!)
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:00 AM
I wrote this off and on during the sessions at the recent Mobius 2005 conference. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness, so you'll have to forgive me if it tends to ramble a bit, or switches tense. I had hoped to have this published sooner, but after my flight home was delayed by 5 hours which got me into bed by 3:30 AM, the next few days were a bit of groggy write-off as I tried to dig myself out of a mound of email and tasks. I didn't write about every session - I took bits of pieces of what I found interesting and relevant.
I'm down here in lovely downtown Seattle for Mobius, a conference that Microsoft puts on every 12-16 months for a mix of mobile device community leaders, journalists, and analysts. Full disclosure: it's an all-expenses paid trip (hotel + airfare) for most of us, though some people paid their own way, and we always end up getting some goodies to take home and play with. The real focus of Mobius is to bring together the leaders of the top mobile devices communities and Web sites, to show them what Microsoft is up to, and to have discussions with them about the mobile space. Since the Windows Mobile group at Microsoft includes the Portable Media Center (yes, it's a Windows Mobile device), one session at Mobius was devoted to the PMC. Here's what I learned about the next-generation of devices.
Portable Media Center v2
According to Pete Bernard, Group Manager, Portable Media Centers represent the "tip of the sword" – most of the innovations that Microsoft is creating around media comes from this type of device, and the enhancements make their way down to Pocket PCs and Smartphones. For the next generation of PMCs, they focused on several things: making the devices cheaper, giving consumers more choice through giving the OEMs options for differentiation (FM tuners, recording radio, PVR functionality, DVB-H tuners, more CODECS, etc.), making the devices better photography companions, ensuring that the devices look better (improved industrial design), and focusing on content – enabling premium video content, and creating a single content portal to drive consumers to the content they want for their devices. That's a big list - I wonder how they did at achieving all those items?
New devices will have user interface extensions that allow OEMs to add new menu items. OEMs will also be able to distribute new CODEC support via Flash ROM updates. This is a great update, because it means that even though Microsoft isn't shipping a DivX CODEC on the device, if Creative Labs wants to, they could – and after the fact at that. The lack of popular video codec support is a huge issue with these devices, so this helps address that.
The issue of video transcoding was brought up – Pete said that there's a new transcoding engine coming that moves from a 1 to 1 ratio of time to transcode to a 4 to 1 ratio (meaning you could transcode a 60 minute video in 15 minutes). There were no specifics on when this would be released – I have a hunch it's something we'll see in the Vista timeframe. That would definitely be a welcome improvement, but ultimately what we really need is for Windows Media Player to run as a system service so it can transcode content in the background if needed - or no transcoding at all with better native file support.
I routinely shut down Windows Media Player when I'm through with it, and it's irritating to have the "Video is currently being converted, do you want to stop?" error pop up. Also, if Windows Media Player was a system service, then it would have a much better chance of discovering new music added to monitored folders (this design flaw bugs me to no end).
I'm down here in lovely downtown Seattle for Mobius, a conference that Microsoft puts on every 12-16 months for a mix of mobile device community leaders, journalists, and analysts. Full disclosure: it's an all-expenses paid trip (hotel + airfare) for most of us, though some people paid their own way, and we always end up getting some goodies to take home and play with. The real focus of Mobius is to bring together the leaders of the top mobile devices communities and Web sites, to show them what Microsoft is up to, and to have discussions with them about the mobile space. Since the Windows Mobile group at Microsoft includes the Portable Media Center (yes, it's a Windows Mobile device), one session at Mobius was devoted to the PMC. Here's what I learned about the next-generation of devices.
Portable Media Center v2
According to Pete Bernard, Group Manager, Portable Media Centers represent the "tip of the sword" – most of the innovations that Microsoft is creating around media comes from this type of device, and the enhancements make their way down to Pocket PCs and Smartphones. For the next generation of PMCs, they focused on several things: making the devices cheaper, giving consumers more choice through giving the OEMs options for differentiation (FM tuners, recording radio, PVR functionality, DVB-H tuners, more CODECS, etc.), making the devices better photography companions, ensuring that the devices look better (improved industrial design), and focusing on content – enabling premium video content, and creating a single content portal to drive consumers to the content they want for their devices. That's a big list - I wonder how they did at achieving all those items?
New devices will have user interface extensions that allow OEMs to add new menu items. OEMs will also be able to distribute new CODEC support via Flash ROM updates. This is a great update, because it means that even though Microsoft isn't shipping a DivX CODEC on the device, if Creative Labs wants to, they could – and after the fact at that. The lack of popular video codec support is a huge issue with these devices, so this helps address that.
The issue of video transcoding was brought up – Pete said that there's a new transcoding engine coming that moves from a 1 to 1 ratio of time to transcode to a 4 to 1 ratio (meaning you could transcode a 60 minute video in 15 minutes). There were no specifics on when this would be released – I have a hunch it's something we'll see in the Vista timeframe. That would definitely be a welcome improvement, but ultimately what we really need is for Windows Media Player to run as a system service so it can transcode content in the background if needed - or no transcoding at all with better native file support.
I routinely shut down Windows Media Player when I'm through with it, and it's irritating to have the "Video is currently being converted, do you want to stop?" error pop up. Also, if Windows Media Player was a system service, then it would have a much better chance of discovering new music added to monitored folders (this design flaw bugs me to no end).
