In our increasingly mobile society, portability is king. With portable media centers, you can store and access nearly all of your digital entertainment files on a single, lightweight unit which is smaller paperback novel!

Portable media players can handle recorded television programs, movies, home videos, music and digital photos. You can even connect a portable media center to a television or stereo using the A/V-out jack when portability isn't necessary. .

Storage Capacity and File Types
Windows Mobile-based portable media centers currently feature 20-GB or 40-GB storage capacities and can store and play not only music and photos, but also video content.

A portable media center with a 40-GB hard disk can hold up to 160 hours of video, up to 10,000 songs or tens of thousands of digital photographs.

Archos currently offers non-Windows portable video player/recorders with similar capabilities to the Windows PMCs, but Archos' players feature up to 100 GB (400 hours of video) of storage.

Archos AV420 Pocket Video Recorder

One advantage of the Archos players is the dramatic increase in capacity - another major advantage is that television programs and movies can be recorded directly from TV, VCR or cable/satellite; with Windows Mobile-based portable media centers, a PC running Windows XP Media Center must serve as an intermediary in the video transfer process.

A wide variety of different file types are supported by portable media player/recorders so that numerous sources of media content can be stored on them including:

Music copied from a CD
Pictures from a digital camera
Home movies from a digital video camera
TV shows recorded on a computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition or other personal video recorder programs
Videos downloaded from the Internet

Portable media centers can also play premium downloaded digital music and video from various online services - It should be noted, however, that DVDs you own should not be transferred to these devices due to copyright restrictions