2. Rite Of Passage

To transfer multimedia files onto the PMC, there are three solutions. If you have a Media Center 2005 PC, an additional input is displayed on the interface when you plug in the Player. It's located in the "Add-Ins" menu. You select it with the remote control; then you're asked if you want to synchronize all the photo, video and audio content according to your preferences. This is a nice feature, but it is not for everyone.

You can select the content to be transferred yourself. With music, it's possible to choose individual songs, but for video and photos, you can only synchronize all files or a classification of favorites. You can't select individual files, which frankly is not very practical. If you want to transfer content without any computer expertise using only a remote control, it's not very logical. One additional line for each multimedia file would have been a more obvious approach - a capability that should be available with the next Service Pack.

If on the other hand you only have a traditional PC, synching it up with the players requires Media Player 10. In our previous article on the Media Center 2005 , we note that this utility was too complicated, but the final version for PMC is less of a headache. When you plug the player in, the transfer window opens automatically. Then all you have to do is drag a file with the mouse and it's ready to be transferred. At the time of synchronization, the PMC detects the format of the file and moves it into what it decides is the right category-music, video or photo. This is still more of a constraint than a simple copy/paste to a removable disk, because you first have to drag the files in the interface and then start the synchronization. The process is also longer. Finally, provided that MP 10 is installed, the PMC is recognized as a removable disk. You can then use it for files of any type. You can even transfer photos and MP3s to be viewed/played, as long as the format is one the PMC recognizes. You can also copy multimedia files to another PC.

DivX Compatible, But

What's more of a problem is the non-recognition of video files. The PMC can read MP3 and JPEG, which are both the most common file formats in their respective areas, but it's limited to the WMV format for video. This proprietary Microsoft format is recognized in Media Player versions 7,8 and 9. The compression quality is similar to that of DivX. However, the problem is that you'll have to transcode video formats like DivX and MPEG. It is done very simply, however. Just as for other files, you simply drag a DivX file to the transfer window and using the synchronization utility, Windows will do the re-encoding. This is a big advantage over the Archos player. Regardless of the format, as long as you have the proper codec installed on the PC, the Media Player handles transcoding the file into WMV at the proper resolution - 320 x 240. For those a little more versed in techno-speak, that corresponds to a rate of 800 kbps at 30 images per second. With the Archos AV 400, some videos will not be recognized, and more and more won't be as time goes on - until you install an update of the firmware, and with it the newer codecs. Currently, approximately 20% of the DivXs on the Web are not recognized by the Archos. And, if the file is too large, the AV 400 will play it, but it will be jerky.

Meanwhile, file transfers with the PMC system take a long time - a very long time. On a PC with a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor with 1 GB of memory, it took 30 minutes to transfer a 90-minute movie. With a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, it'll take over an hour.