1. Kai Cherry on November 10, 2004 11:03 PM writes...

The basic problem with PVPs as opposed to cds, is in fact, "ripping".

For the "alpha geek" crowd, this seems ike "a small price to pay" but for a real, serious consumer device, this just not going to fly. It takes too long to transcode content...its not like you rip and reencode a dvd in 5 mins like you can a cd.

Timeshifting/spaceshifting recorded media from say, tv/tivo is where its at, but there laptops have you beat.

Ok, so hen there is size...and yes in this case, size matters.

An ipod sized device, horizontally oriented and pretty much all screen, and about the same mass would what i would call portable...but what about the control schemes? not a lot of room for one-naded operation, and we don't want to go backwards.

What you have left then would be content creator providing the content that people want, but it would have to use a compression scheme that would allow for a feature length film for example to to xferred in no more than say, 15minss on a 300Kb/sec cablemodem downstream...and still have clarity and detail worth watching

This is a *tall order* guys...let's be honest. The "critical mass" for something to be a successful *consumer oriented* pvp (as opposed to geek oriented) really isn't there.