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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

That whole DRM thing makes me wonder how Apple managed to "avoid" a lot of this mess with the iPod

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.

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.

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 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 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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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 imagine iriver deliberately made the layout this way to not compete with their music focused players they actually cared about

thank God for the Zen Vision M being a pure media player without BS

Having the dethklok shout out is the best part of this video. Amazing video I love forgotten tech like this!

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...

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.

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.

Great video thanks for the time and effort! Found it very interesting!

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.

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

Another great video. One of the best channels on KZfaq

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

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

Hey man, found your channel with the Doom Dual Monitor video and enjoy your stuff, especially tech from around this time, this was when I was 110% invested in electronics and comuters. Also DRM is a headache. Was then and still is now.

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.

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.

Fascinating, I remember what a mess DRM was at the time and how much of a pain it was to deal with

That bliss background tho

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Great video I had always wondered about portable media centers, as big fan media center edition full windows and built myself number of these for my home, but your video makes glad picked the Archos player I must find where I put that it was great

I would love to get these kinds of old tech in my hands again I miss those days

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 the hat! I don't normally wear them, but I might want one of those myself.

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 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.

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.

Its cool seeing another VGM collector/enjoyer, nice video! :)

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

This takes me back to my Gamepark GP32 days

I love that we have the same taste in music. I was just listening to Dethklok today! 🤣

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

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.

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).

Nice Voyager series shirt!

oh man iriver and zune were pretty neat-o at the time. Shame they were blown away.

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.

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'm sure the Chocolate Zune is still by far the "Infamous Zune" to this day!! LOL

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 had the PMP-140 and it was the BEST thing ever!!!

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.

You can sure bet I had no idea this existed! You said all I could possibly say about it And that other iRiver device sure sounds interesting, even nowadays a mass market device running Linux to me is rare (Just using the kernel doesn't count) but back then? Sounds like finding a unicorn while going for a walk. Hope you fetch one, because it'll be (hopefully) a good time. That said, wow and I thought people who got a Zune had it rough, PMC people were basically rugpulled

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 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)

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

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.

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

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!

Shelby, Deathklok is awesome !! 17:09 🤘 (you probably already knew that though)

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)!

The sound of a plate spinning in a handheld device seems so bizarre. Also, Dethklok!! \m/

The Media Center Edition is really great. I'll Take it.

Have you done any work with Archos players that were in the pro-sumer range at the time? As a teenager back then I always wanted one but sadly was never lucky enough to get one. The AV320 was always one that stood out to me

Wow I've never even heard about this OS but I loved windows mobile with all the apps and games that it took android and ios years to even come close to what we already had on windows

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.

Another early MP3 player was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in September 1998. I had a few.

Ahhh Dank Pods will be proud of this episode 😆

I'm slightly embarrassed to say it, but I knew immediately that the woman on the box was Jenna Jameson.

21:28 - That has to be the quietest dot matrix printer i've ever heard! 😳

Microsoft capitulating heavily to the RIAA is why these and the Zune are toys forgotten to history, and the iPod is legendary, even to a proud crapple hater like myself.

i had an mptrip mp3 cd player back around 2000. It was the first inexpensive mp3 cd player to hit the market as far as I know. Was the size of a diskman, but would play a 650 or 700mb cd full of mp3 tracks. It didnt handle VBR from what I recall, but, would play pretty much any constant bitrate mp3s.

The best 'Media Player' I ever had (and still use) is a BlackBerry Passport. It reads everything! From mp1 to flac (including HD Multichannel). I have almost 100GB of music on it, over 50% of which is in 24-bit.

Rocked an iriver h140 then h340. still works :)

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.

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..

Very nice

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.

Have you looked into the Nokia Maemo devices like the N800 at all? Maemo was a Linux-based OS developed by Nokia to try and compete with Android and iOS back in the mid-2000s. They seem like they'd be right up your alley. I loved mine back in the day.

Around this time I was still rocking a generic 1GB stick Mp3 player that plugged directly into my PC I had gotten as a Christmas gift at work, but in very early 07 I got a Sansa C240, .leather case, and a 2GB Micro SD card that I loved, I eventually put rockbox on it, and loaded it with a 16GB Micro SD card for all kinds of old school formats, and eventually got a new battery for it around 2012, which is now dead, but I still have the player, and it would work if I could only find a dang battery!!!