Robert Scoble: those of us who fly coach often sure would love a nice "video iPod." I agree. However, the road there is likely to be rocky.
Last month, I bought a Casio EX Z4 camera. I'm quite pleased with the form factor and the quality not only of the pictures, but of the monitor screen. In fact, I remarked to my wife that this would be an ideal form factor for a Location Free TV, and she readily agreed.
So I did a bit of research, and found that EX-Z4U marketed in North America does not include the Movie Mode. Thanks, Casio.
Now, let's take a look at the video formats supported by proposed Portable Media Center. Windows Media Video, and an assorted set of still image and audio formats. No mention of Real. No Quicktime. And most importantly, no MPEG. While I intend to keep an eye on this, for the moment, I'll pass.
For the short term, I'm looking into the WinTV-PVR-350, and possibly MythTV. Since I tend to travel with my laptop anyway, for the moment, that will be my target device.
Last year, I was playing with a friend's Archos Jukebox, which was basically a 40GB hardrive with a MP3/MPEG4 player / JPG viewer / TXT viewer slapped on it. It worked, but had a tiny screen.
I did an experiment and recorded a TV show to my PC, encoded it into MPEG4 with DivX/MP3 compression, and loaded it on to the Archos and did some remote viewing. It was more novel than functional, but only because the screen was so small.
Just browsed the archos.com site, which has newer, better products with bigger screens. Might be worth a look:
Even worse - does it support the DVR-MS files that XP-MCE records?
I don't think that's technically "Windows Media Video" (WMV) format.
But that would be great if they sychronized...
Scoble talks about how an iPod for video would be ideal for coach-seat
entertainment. Sam chimes in, but has reservations given that the new windows
media center devices at CES were wma only. I think this is the moment I need to
give an update a device that actually fits their requirements perfectly, the
Archos AV3xx series. I have an AV380,
see my earlier post on the history of it.
Toshiba makes an MCE enabled laptop Satellite 5205-S705.
MS-DVR is effectively WMV with a DRM wrapper, but you are free to burn to a DVD and re-rip :)
I have seen an Ipod stream video to a Gameboy Advance. This gentlman that showed it to me used to work for Nintendo (now at Sony). He compressed video to the screen resolution of the GBA, wrote a program that would stream the video...in fact it was the movie Finding Nemo. It looked unbelievably clear and sounded great.
He did this while researching the GBA video cartridges which can be bought now.
I'd prefer to stay anonymous if you happen to track my IP.