Hey I said PMP....
I will be heading to DC again this week, I was going through my regular ritual of copying music and video over to my laptop so I have something to entertain myself but it got me thinking I really need a Portable Media Player, something small enough to be easy to use on a cramped plane, yet big enough to enjoy, something with a good battery life too.
In any event one of the reasons I have not got one to-date was that converting content so that it was ready for the PMP is a bit of a pain (my son has a Zune and we do it for his cartoons); I just ran across a MCE add-in called MCEBuddy that helps out on this problem.
I think I will set MCEBuddy up for my son and see how it works, if it works well I might give it a whirl two; the biggest deal breaker for me here is that I use Open Cable Receivers (OCURs) for all of my television recordings and they are all DRM encrusted, which means I cannot (as of yet) take this content with me.
The thing most don't know about the OCURs is that 100% of the content recorded with a OCUR ends up getting DRMed if you have a Cable Card inserted, that’s even if the content is not tagged as requiring DRM by the content publisher. My first response to this was that this was Microsoft being overly restrictive but upon further research it turns out this was a CableLabs requirement for OCUR certification :(.
This results in two key technology needs, we now need a "trusted transcoding service" that can down-res, convert content, and re-drm content so it’s appropriate for scenarios like this and lastly we need more competition from the likes of DirecTV and Dish; if these guys deliver solutions without these draconian restrictions maybe CableLabs will lighten up.
Only time will tell.