Forgotten Before Zune - Microsoft Portable Media Center
Вставка
- Опубліковано 5 жов 2024
- While researching Windows XP Media Center I found out about a product segment I had never heard of before, Portable Media Centers. I had to get one to find out what it was. After using it, this I am disappointed in it, not for what it is, but for what it wasn't.
Archived materials from this: archive.org/de...
Here are some ways to help me make more videos!
Buy some Merch:
Merch: tech-tangents....
Leave a one time tip:
Paypal one-time: paypal.me/AkBKukU
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/tech...
Amazon Wishlist for Production Gear:
www.amazon.com...
Become a monthly supporter:
Patreon: / akbkuku
UA-cam Membership: / @techtangents
Paypal Monthly: techtangents.n...
Other Links
UA-cam: / akbkuku
Twitch: / techtangents
Github: github.com/AkB...
Thingiverse: www.thingivers...
Discord: / discord
You missed a trick, you can use Nero to burn an image of an audio CD then mount it in Daemon Tools and rip it back using WMP. I had one of the Creative Zen devices back in the day
Yeah, that kind of expensive (non-pirated) tool suite is why this isn't a solution he mentioned.
@@KiraSlith Both are free basic version.
@@nathantronAt the time Nero tools did not have a free version unless your CD drive included it as a pack-in, and Daemon Tools Lite still had a trial bomb.
Other alternative not mentioned is using CD-RWs. Always had hundreds or even close to a thousand rewrites if I remember correctly. I think it would be enough for copying your mp3 collection and updating it back then.
winamp is free and still has a website in fact they recently updated the installer, not sure if it was mentioned as i just started this vid
YOU ARE AN ACTUAL LEGEND. I have been trying to hunt down an hdd image or recovery for mine for ages! my drive isn't dead but the software is corrupted.
Update on that. that HDD image is working wonderful on mine. booted up first try so later on i'm gonna try to put an ssd in it and see if it still works.
When I was a kid in 2005, I remember really wanting an Archos PMA400, it ran linux, had a 30gb hdd and 320x240 screen, I had forgotten about is for years until you said something about Linux based media players at the end of this video.
Oh wow, you’ve just reminded me of the it’s predecessor I owned, the Archos Jukebox!
@@GTFour I had one of those as well when I was in college in the early 2000s. Great thing about them was when you plugged it into a computer it just showed up as an external hard drive. So I often used to download at school to download 'stuff' from Usenet groups using their broadband in a fraction of the time it would take me at home as I was still stuck on dial-up.
Holy hell! Yes, i forgot about that thing
I had Archos AV420 back then. It was multimedia only, cheaper version of pma400. I used it for years for music and video playback after finally replacing it with smartfone.
Yes!
Taking a look at the hard drive image, it seems like the first partition actually contains the Windows CE nk.bin (in other words, this is effectively the system image which is loaded into RAM) and a few other files, so it was actually a really good call to image the drive. The bootloader is probably the thing in flash, though.
I'm so thankful that the CD format was invented and entrenched before DRM came around
Man, I drooled over iRiver and Archos devices when I was a kid. I had that SanDisk Sansa player that you showed briefly (mine was the 1GB silver one) and I wanted so desperately to have a device with video functionality. A year or two later the Zune came out and it was everything I ever wanted. I unironically love the Zune, with the brown translucent one being my favorite. I eventually upgraded to the 80GB second gen model and then onto the iPod Touch. I remember watching the G4 Gadget Pr0n segment about the iPod Touch probably 100 times on my Zune while I was slowly saving up for an iPod Touch. I don't think I've ever wanted something so badly, even to this day. Everything is kinda samey these days so it's hard to get that excited about anything.
@jafizzle95 I recently refurbed a 5th gen iPod and seeing the old font brings back such nostalgia. Recommended if you're still into portable music for sure.
I had an older Archos Jukebox and I really loved that brick. When it died I bought a Pocket PC which also allowed me to use emulation and use it as a MP3 player.
I wanted those too, however, I was happy with my RCA Lyra Jukebox.
That whole DRM thing makes me wonder how Apple managed to "avoid" a lot of this mess with the iPod
They sold the music and that music was drmd so it'd only work for the person who bought it
DRM is still very much a problem now (especially with 4K movies). It really makes sense why DRM-free versions of movies from "certain" websites are still being downloaded.
Brand loyalty
@@cncgeneral That was functionally the model for iTunes, not for the iPod. All-in, I think I spent nearly a grand on iPods and never a single penny on iTunes. No DRM, ever.
I do think having iTunes as a pipeline certainly helped Apple smooth the way with the recording industry, though.
@@rommix0 I so wish I could just buy 4K movies and TV shows that I can play on my computer or TV but also just go round to a friends house and play that movie I own at their house like we used to back in the day when I had a big VHS collection and we'd share them back and forth with friends. Having movie nights at each others houses. Today I don't buy any movies. No way I'm ever going to buy movies from different sites like google and amazon and then have to remember which web service my movie is on, bah!
As I recall, I got all my MP3s on there by adding them to MCE2005 and then syncing from there. It would transcode to WMA as it transferred. Then again, I played around with subscription music and FairUse4WM back then too. Yes, it supported subscription music like Napster2Go and SpiralFrog. I even recall some service for subscription video, like MLB Season Pass or something (definitely MLB-related).
I always felt like they're were 3 or 4 generations of music players showing the late 90s/early 2000s. The first was the Rio era, followed by the second generation devices with more memory, like the creative jukebox, then the iPod showed up and everything else was forgotten. Nothing tried as hard, got as much support, or sold as well.
But anyway, that second gen was peak mp3 player. No drm yet, it was good times. But damn was technology advancing so fast.
Wade from DankPods would surely be interested in this. His video on the Zune showed me just how ham-fistedly Microsoft handled things, and this device shows it certainly wasn't a one-off bungle.
Quite seriously what I was thinking too lol
“Can you believe no one bought this?”
@@gmcnewlook "stand back I'm arming the nugg"
@@Gadgetman1989 a whole new nugg
@@gmcnewlook "vocalizing a whole new world"
I had three or four Zunes back in the day. My favorite MP3 player by far. The UI was great and the software was hands down more user friendly and clean looking than iTunes. Shame it fell off so hard
The original bigger zune was the best
I'm working on replacing my zune 80 battery right now. It's gonna be getting used heavily very shortly.
FYI - it was *not* based on Windows Mobile, but shares a common foundational base (Windows CE). The logo and splash screens were all there just because the project received some advertising budget from the Windows Mobile group (same overall organization). In fact, the media stack used by PMC and CE (for set-top boxes) was completely different than the media stack being used by Windows Mobile at the time.
For me, the best of those "media centers" are those supported by rockbox. Some Olympus, iriver, Creative and toshiba models are supported and rockbox really shows how great these devices could've been.
Rockbox is why I bought my iPod nano.
I was all about using an iAudio X5 with rockbox. It weren't the best experience for normal end users but it sure was awesome for more technical minded users. I only stopped using it in 2015 because it fell on the floor and half the LCD was gone :(
I have a Red Sandisk Sansa C240 I put RockBox on, and it made that little player so so much better, I still have it to this day with the leather case, and a 16GB Micro SD card. I had to degunk the soft touch rubber buttons, and sadly the 2nd battery I got for it around 2012 died about 4 years ago swelling up with a bang!!, and I've not been able to find another one, or it would still be in good working order.
I get genuinely ordered one of these when I was younger .was so happy to order it , then the post lost it ,I was devastated.
I had a Panasonic D-Snap. The cool thing about it was you could record a signal from
Composite cables and make videos on it. It was very small too.
I had a Toshiba Gigabeat S - basically the same hardware platform as the Zune (only without the WiFi and the weird "social" stuff), and it also ran PMC. Well, until you wiped that off to put Rockbox on it, and then it became an absolutely top-notch device, with a Wolfson DAC and the ability to play *anything*.
I still use an iRiver H320, upgraded to 40gig HDD and an extended battery, and I'm very happy with it. I think its a great little player or 'portable jukebox' they called it. Sure its seriously chunky for a pocket player but it has lots of capabilities that players of the time just didnt have, and supports mutliple file types. You can even flasha new OS onto them for video playback.
God that era of whacky pre smartphone portable media players, I miss it but I also don't, I'm just glad I can still use my 2003 ipod w/ a 2020 apple mac and software w/o a hitch
I got a Creative Zen V when my original iPod died, and that thing was awesome. The screen was tiny, but the whole device was so small it was hard to be upset about it. It showed up as a USB drive and played most era-appropriate files.
Last year I found out it's pretty common for their screens to die, unfortunately. Got a brand new one on Amazon that seems barely more capable.
i don't know why you didn't look at something else? I've got a Hifi Walker H2 and it's bad ass, i've got a 400GB sandisk ultra micro sd card in it, it's got high quality Burr Brown dac, plays Hi-Res up to 24/192 & dsd and the most important thing for me was the gapless playback. i can't stand that gap or beep in between songs that almost all players had.
edit: oh and it was like $130 and requires no special software to load music
5:45 that's a TTA 24pin standard connector, mainly used in South Korea for charging and data transferring. Although it had extensive bandwidth compared to mini-b port many devices didn't utilized it and soon vanished after Android smartphones started to use micro-b connectors
How can you say that TV is the least interesting?! That’s literally the whole reason I bought two Samsung YH-999 PMCs. You absolutely could sync with Windows Media Center. It only worked with MCE2005, as I recall, and you have to go through special setup in WMC. You could tell it to sync all, last recording, specific videos, etc.
I'm surprised you don't remember plays for sure. It was Microsoft's step at standardizing the drm on it's devices. It wasn't the first time though. They previously had several attempts at different music stores that all were abandoned and plays for sure was supposed to be the end all be all... Then zune came out. Microsoft was like Google back then, in starting up projects and killing them shortly after.
There were lots of music store attempts, and until iTunes, they all flopped. The 2000s were a sort of 'golden age of piracy' - everyone did it, and it was ridiculously easy. Why would anyone ever to to the trouble of fighting DRM, setting up payments and parting with their money when it was so much easier to run a quick search on one of the many popular p2p programs?
oh man iriver and zune were pretty neat-o at the time. Shame they were blown away.
At this time, I was rocking the sandisk mp3 player with SD-card slot, it was amazing value when you factored in the "limitless" storage.
In the end mine broke out the screen when I had it with keys in the same pocket, but luckily I had left it in shuffle so I could still keep using it.
After that, I used it in outdoors extreme weather type of situations until it didn't play music anymore.
That's the same kind of 1.8" ZIF IDE drive that was in the iPod and a lot of portable players at that time, which means you can most likely pop an SSD in there to make it faster and the battery last longer - if only there was anything worthwhile to do with it :)
I actually have a laptop that uses one of those hard drives.
I miss this "ecosystem" of Microsoft products, and I remembered salivating over these devices but just didn't have the cash.
I agree with this overview, i'm also one who buys music on CD still and rips them to FLAC (with embedded artwork for each disc) however I use my phone for music but I use the MicroSD card slot solely for music.
I used to buy dedicated players and I avoided the iPod and devices like the iRiver purely because I couldn't just drag and drop my music using a file explorer in Windows or Linux and be on my way.
I even have a laptop connected to my hi-fi with my music on and while it's sole purpose is to boot into XP and run Winamp it's a bit overkill but those sweet visualisations are a joy to see while the music is playing. As i'm sure you are interested it's a HP 6710p with a Audigy 2 ZS Notebook sound card which adds optical out but the sound from it is pretty good too.
for converting audio files give DBpoweramp a shot their converter can convert ANYTHING to ANYTHING, we use it in broadcast, and it just works even with obscure formats, and keeps tags...
thank God for the Zen Vision M being a pure media player without BS
That bliss background tho
Thank you for the (albeit brief) reminder of my glorious PSP emulation/homebrew/music enjoying days! ☺ God I loved that thing, it was just the _coolest_ at the time...
Have a look at that big nugget!
In 2006ish I had a flashcart for my DS and could play music and videos on that. Nowhere near as high end as this thing, but it was pretty solid for the price and time. Played music alright, played video, could run linux with wifi and of course, plenty of games, and even some emulators were surprisingly usable. Not as capable as a PSP but generally cheaper, and a wholly different selection of games.
Sounds like we have a dankpods fan. He seems like a pretty cool guy.
I imagine iriver deliberately made the layout this way to not compete with their music focused players they actually cared about
I had a creative zen vision. Paid out the nose for it at the time. I worked around chemicals that fumed out that eventually corroded the player. Creative was cool and replaced it free of charge. I got it back a week before my wife's grandfather died. She was pregnant with our first child at the time. It was awesome on the 6 hour flight. I had 2 batteries and by the time we got to her parents house, the first batteries died. About 3 days later, my wife needed to go to the bathroom the 5th time and accidentally stepped on the screen. It was rendered an external HDD after that. Eventually the USB shorted and killed it dead. I still have the HDD, used to have that 2nd battery until my mother got kicked out of her place. Great memories with it.
I would love to get these kinds of old tech in my hands again I miss those days
Oh yeah, these things! I remember reading about them back when they were new, and they seemed like such a good idea. They were astronomically above our budget back then, but seeing one now I'm rather glad I avoided one.
They looked so promising and feature packed, but like all too many things back then, utterly crippled by DRM and iffy software.
While I don't remember these at all -- and I think I can see why, given what I've seen here.
Heck, lack of money meant I didn't even have an MP3 player; I just kept using my existing Discman, and buying a CD once in a while -- usually with gift cards from relatives. And I wasn't in the habit of ripping CDs either, between that and a lack of hard drive space to rip them to.
I think if I'd had more money and _had_ bought one of these, I'd have tried to return it.
@@AaronOfMpls Did you have an older computer ? Around this time hard drives were getting very big very quickly.
I had a fast CD Burner and went to a small school. If anyone bought a new CD they'd give it to me and I would burn copies for everyone else. It helped me build a huge music library and made everyone happy.
@@Gatorade69 Yup, I was still using my no-brand Windows 98 PC until 2007 -- when I could finally afford something better. (Though I did get a bigger hard drive a few years before that)
@@AaronOfMpls It really was amazing at just how fast tech was growing at that time. I had a Compaq that had a 5gb hard drive and a year or two later I was buying a Maxtor 40gb Hard drive at a decent price and then again two years later I was buying a 250gb hard drive at still around the same price of the 40gb one.
Fascinating, I remember what a mess DRM was at the time and how much of a pain it was to deal with
Murmaider.. Brutal.
I wonder if MP3s ripped using Windows Media Player would have worked.
On a related note, WMP back then supported the download of metadata for ripping CDs. With some tricks it can still work even today and it technically should also work for burned CDs if the track lengths are correct. Though even back then the intended use was probably to rip your purchased CDs anyway
I absolutely loved the video! the format had a bit to be desired, but the River PMC device was awesome to see and to learn about (since I come from that era of evolving tech and tech ideas), and I just had to slam the thumb and sub buttons when I seen the "Ye 'Ole Ancient Printer" printing out the names of your patreon supporters. That was freaking awesome!
Having the dethklok shout out is the best part of this video. Amazing video I love forgotten tech like this!
Code Monkeys, Dethklok and Prodigy, huzzah! A man of quality! I only had to struggle with the enormous Creative Jukebox mp3 plaer the size of a cd player, this thing looks like a headache!
Its cool seeing another VGM collector/enjoyer, nice video! :)
I had one of these, ordered off Newegg with basically all the money I had from the summer. I loved it so much and if I can find it, I’ll see if it still fires back up.
I was tempted to do a video on my pokey little channel about this as I was TOTALLY obsessed with these devices back in the day. But the prices of them are a little bit out of my price bracket to do a video that only gets 60 views. Great video. I enjoyed it.
I had an iriver H340 which was a great digital audio player back then. I had all the accessories, like the remote control with a little display, docking station (which tore the usb connector apart :D) backup AA Battery compartment and what not.
It had a 40 GB Harddrive and could also play videos, although they had to be in a specific format.
But it played audio from wave, mp3 flac and all sorts of other codecs. It had great sound options, eq and srs wow features.
I still have it, but sadly the hdd failed. I wanted to replace it with a cf-card but never bothered, since we have smartphones and on demand music now
This looks like such a compromise, it's no wonder MS killed it stone dead and let everyone forget it existed. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one out there still ripping CDs and using a standalone media player daily in 2023, but in my case it's a 32GB Zune HD. The Zune software (version 2, not the horrendous first one) just presents my media in a way that made so much sense to me, while also not looking like a bad database application (iTunes, I'm looking at you).
I wonder if you had tried out the official Windows Media encoder (which was freeware BTW), as it does support batch conversions by using an included script file, and it should accept MP3s as input files.
I bet he didn't
Does it transfer metadata?
Nokia had few Linux based Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810) in the 2000s. While they weren't dedicated portable media players they did work fine for music and low resolution videos
I had a 770. It was an interesting device, definitely felt ahead of its time in some ways.
Zune 80 was the best mp3 player ever, I still have my Zune HD. There was plenty of video DRM related to Media Center and TV. Microsoft actually had the broadcast flag implemented on recorded TV from places like HBO. I miss the green button.
The background history on this period was an interesting walk back through a dark time, I had forgotten how crazy things had become. I see the need for DRM, but wow has it been implemented poorly through the ages. Thanks for the work.
I love that we have the same taste in music. I was just listening to Dethklok today! 🤣
I remember reading about the Linux-based iRiver players back in the day, but I never owned one. I'd love to see a review if you ever manage to find one.
I'm glad that I managed to steer clear of these back then, specifically because of the DRM - I had a PSP and a couple PDAs that I could stuff MP3s on in a pinch, but I was far more likely to be listening to music on my PC or in my car at the time - in the latter case, I installed a MP3-compatible head unit in my Honda Civic at about the same time the iRiver in this video came out, and that worked out pretty well for a few years.
..."1 DAY AGO..."
@@dylanherron3963 Channel Members and Patrons get early access.
@@brandonupchurch7628 I figured it was a membership thing, more of a joke
The egregious implementation of DRM is certainly memorable. You Won't soon forget that.
This takes me back to my Gamepark GP32 days
My favorites from the time were the Creative Zen Pebble, and the Sansa Clip+ with the Rockbox firmware. I highly recommend checking out the Rockbox firmware.
Man that brings back good memories with the Clip+, it was was a good player but with Rockbox it became great. Used it for year and years.
Before the GoPro era my dad used the TV recording function of one of these as a mobile DVR for his Helmet Camera while mountain biking
ill never forget my 64mb RCA MP3 Player lmfao, it was so small and barely held any songs, but it was new lol
later on i got a 60gb creative mp4 player w/ 4" screen, then a 120gb ipod classic for its capacity and size.
and then in the past year or so i finally moved my mp3s to my phone
Another great video. One of the best channels on UA-cam
i liked iriver. i had a little 64mb(i think) mp3 player from them and i was impressed with how complex the firmware was for something so small.
Fun fact: not only did DRM make a terrible experience for users, but it also made Apple king of the music industry for a while.
I'm still genuinely surprised Steve Jobs *asked* them go DRM-free.
I'm sure the Chocolate Zune is still by far the "Infamous Zune" to this day!! LOL
The sound of a plate spinning in a handheld device seems so bizarre.
Also, Dethklok!! \m/
"my memory sticks were always full of...
...other things."
The pregnant pause just before and the emphasis on "other" makes it sound like you had government secrets or... other things.
21:28 - That has to be the quietest dot matrix printer i've ever heard! 😳
I love the hat! I don't normally wear them, but I might want one of those myself.
LOL, side note. I know someone who had a Zune and I remember that it was rendered completely unusable on any New Years Eve of a leap year. It expected there to be 365 days in the year and if it was the 366th day, it just wouldn't work until New Years Day.
I vaguely recall encountering the obscure wma format you refer to, and I'm glad I never messed with it back in the 90s / 00s.
Archos was the other big name for this type of player back then. They had a wide range of cool-looking PMPs that I couldn’t afford.
6:35 - Ahhh the lovely sounds of a portable hard drive...
I sorta never got the portable MP3 player craze, i had been using a pocket PC PDA for years and they played MP3 off SD card as well as most of the media players, and did a hell of a lot more
Nice, I had the iriver PMP-140 as my sidekick for a year or so. My friendlier on media issues but I remember making the decision of purchasing a PMC or PMP. Looks like I made the right choice. Always regret selling it on.
Maybe the nokia internet tablets? I bet you would have fun with one of those. I bought an n810 around 2012 and had a lot of fun tinkering with the OS. It came with a mobile UI but you could get a full desktop setup running on it which was really neat. Looks like the maemo forums are still up too and not totally dead. Neat!
I also tried using an N810 for various things. Never did make a media player out of it though. Again, still have one, still works, but you can't do much with a 15 year old device on the current internet.
Oh, I also had a Dell PDA which was cool because I could use it to play music, sure, but I could also use it to take notes and stuff and it had an IR blaster and I had an application for it which could use the IR blaster as a universal remote. This is great, but then you run into the issue of there being no actual physical buttons to be able to press to use it as a remote, so you had to take your eyes off the TV to look down at the PDA to see where on the screen you were pressing to adjust the volume or something else that you would often do without actually needing to see a traditional remote.
ah the old metro design....good days
I caught a glimpse of a Cars Greatest Hits album. I approve
Good old XP. Strange thinking about the same company made windows (NT), XP, 2000(2003), 7, and then just stopped making good OS'es. Didn't help they fired most of the people working with those.
Not sure if i remember this device though..
I have a later (non-Windows) Creative Zen (Vision W) and that thing was a godsend in its time. I didn't have a spare PC capable of playing video well enough to dedicate to my wicked awesome 1080 projection TV, but the TV out on the Zen let me load and play easily without any DRM issues.
The screen on it is/was plenty good for the time with decent viewing angles (4.3in, 480x272) I worked second shift at the time and the ability to carry videos to work with me in a small form factor was simply amazing.
I had a RCA Lyra Jukebox MP3 player that could record up to 80 hours of video. I had some pictures, videos I recorded from the TV, and some music. Ahh, the struggles of the early 2000's.
I love the enthusiasm.
i still have this device. and i still have a windows xp media centre pc. neither has been turned on for years tho.
i might be remembering this wrong, but after i recorded my tv shows on the wmc (that had a tv tuner), it was easy to sync and transfer them to this player. however it had to re encode the mpeg video (at 640x480) into wmv (at 320x240) so that process took quite a while depending on the specs of your pc. it all ran in the background tho so it was a matter of leaving it alone.
Ripping cd was even easier as the wmc did it (kinda powered by wmp in the backend) directly into wma. then it was just a file transfer when you would sync it.
however over the years software got updates and i migrated to a much smaller gps device, that was powered by windows ce and could also play wmv and wma on an sd card. i still had a lot of my music on the 20gb iriver back then tho.
whats more positive about the experience at the time was that the interface of both the wmc pc and portable were the same and very simple to use.
it was a shame microsoft could not keep up with ipod and itunes ecosystem and decided to start from scratch with zune, which was also based on windows ce.
Right off the bat I was like "hmmm, Jenna Jameson on the box", lol.
I had the PMP-140 and it was the BEST thing ever!!!
I'm glad that I did not have such trouble with a non iCrap media player back in the day. I had a RCA Lyra and it was a 256MB Model which did decently well. Tried a 1GB RCA Lyra and noticed a ton of artifacting in the playback. A friend actually had an RCA Lyra stereo system that had the capability of ripping CD's to the included portable MP3 player that plugs into it. I was rocking a Sandisk Sansa before switching to a PSP 2000 for portable music then recently went to Android phone to play MP3's. I had an iPod Nano Video at one point but guess what Apple decided to do with their support for it? Apple decided to stop the video capability for the iPod Nano Video in their iTunes. Like WTF Apple? Should have jailbroken it with RockBox or something. Never trusted WMA for music reproduction because of the audio quality drops badly all throughout the playback. Good luck on your treasure hunting!
I can feel synapses firing that have lied dormant for a long time
Nice Voyager series shirt!
Another early MP3 player was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in September 1998. I had a few.
As a youngster I absolutely desired this thing, but it was just too expensive, though it looked super awesome. Ended up with Creative Zen instead.
i loved my creative zen, rocked a 60gb mp4 player until it died and was replaced by (2) 30gb zen players with smaller screen lol
I had the smaller Creative Zen models back when I was trying to find the best portable media bang for the buck in 2007. They were great and had zero DRM, video playback on the mid-tier model, and although the storage capacity wasn't huge, they were sub-$100 and tiny. Loved them to death. Really glad I was coming into adulthood as this whole thing was happening. Exciting times.
I have several iRiver devices, some of them still work to this day.
If you ask me, they were exceptional at the time of release.
(The ones using iRivers own software that is, didn't even know about PMC until this video)
I had an RCA Lyra 2780. Nice little player and easy to use and transfer mp3s to. Also it could record directly from eg TV. Remember using a piece of software to encode videos for it.
Another important point is lossy to lossy conversion is terrible for audio quality especially back then when the algorithms weren't as efficient.
No one used lossless back then too. FLAC was a thing but it was more of a curiosity.
I've started DJing for the local student radio station recently and I got an original Zune because it's cheaper and easier to get one than a good quality iPod. It still works with Windows 10 but the anniversary update did kill video support (Microsoft got rid of the necessary converters or something). But I can use the Zune software and upload mp3s all day and honestly, I kinda like the device.
I slightly missed these, having much later purchased a 1st gen 30GB Zune as a refurb deal at least a couple years after they came out. I did briefly have another iRiver device in-around the 2008-2010 era, and that was the iRiver Spinn.
Honestly a gorgeous device, held back by awful software support. I'm not sure what it ran for an OS, but the OS itself could run Flash, of all things! I'm fairly certain the theming engine was based on it.
You could actually load up Shockwave Flash games to it and some of them would work! Admittedly I don't remember many working well, but technically it was possible to run early web flash games on them.
I'm slightly embarrassed to say it, but I knew immediately that the woman on the box was Jenna Jameson.
Not saying that the rest of the the video is bad, but like for reminding me about code monkeys alone.
I had a couple of Diamond Rio players. My first one was a solid state player called a Rio 500. It had maybe 32 MB capacity and you could put in an expansion card (not SD, but something else that was DS, though I can't remember what it stood for now). This device also only allowed you to transfer files TO it and not off of it using their proprietary software, though it would allow you to remove something to free up the space to add a new song onto it. It also ran on a single AAA alkaline battery.
I also had another Diamond Rio player called the Rio Karma. This one had a rechargable battery and a 20GB hard drive. I loved this thing, but eventually, the drive died.
You should have a look at the Dingoo A320 some day, if you can get your hands on one. It wasn't *quite* just a portable media player, with much of the focus actually being on emulation, but it was definitely designed as a PMP anyway- like having a button lock and a headphone jack on the side :) And it packed a lot more punch than it seemed on the outside, like the ability to play back all sorts of video formats without transcoding, especially for its price (around 60 EUR in 2009)!
If it wasn't for the constant weird diagonal screen tearing I'd love the A320. It might just be my device that had that issue but emulation never felt right on it.
I loved both Windows mobiles early products and Windows Phone. I was a Windows Insider and was even sent a free flagship Lumia 9xx something phone for testing. Windows refused to listen to our feedback, refused to push for popular apps by offering the developers handsome rewards, refused to listen to us insiders but most of all - they refused to listen to Windows insiders lol. If Microsoft began adopting suggestions and feedback when we gave it during Alpha and Beta testing, I would very, very probably be writing this on either my Windows Phone or my foldable Surface tablet in Dock mode. Such a shame.
You should know that that is a lithium metal CMOS battery. They never leak. Although it is probably empty after so many years on the shelf.