I get this strange feeling we’ve been here before.

Leonard says rivals face an uphill battle to compete with Apple’s iPod. From the number of iPods I see on the train each morning compared to competitors, I’d say he’s right.

Poor Microsoft. Nearly every music service and MP3 player maker other than Apple supports Windows Media and its copy-protection software. But not enough music lovers want to use them. It’s a far cry from what happened in the desktop wars. It’s no fun when you’re outside of the closed system looking in.

Windows Media player has been giving me fits for the past couple of months. It got to the point where nearly any video I tried to play with it would hang the player. So I tried to uninstall and reinstall it. No such luck. The uninstall seemed to go fine but when I tried to step back to version 9, it refused to install telling me a new version was already found on my system. So I guess it didn’t uninstall afternoon.

What a pain in the butt piece of software. I thought for a minute there I was running Real Player!

But I recently came across a great little cross-platform media player called VLC Media Player. It’s basic looking but it does something that Windows Media doesn’t do: It just plain works!

Exerpt from their site:

VLC is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Screenshots

Take a Tablet PC and shrink it. Toss in a few portable media features and you’ve got the Origami project. At least that’s my take from what I’ve been able to gather. It seems like yet another “tweener” product. Does it replace a laptop or compliment one? It’s too large and expensive to compete with the iPod. It’s not a phone either. The few people I know who own Tablets say they aren’t interested in moving to a smaller screen. I’m not sure whom Microsoft expects to purchase this device other than the Scoble types who can’t wait for the next gadget.

A friend told me about Hamachi last week and I’ve been using it ever since to connect to my computer at home from my work computer. No network/firewall settings to muck with. It just plain works. I’m very impressed so far.

I’ve been playing around with Ted for a few days and it’s worth the download if you download TV shows. Here’s a quick list of features.

• Checks feeds from TorrentSpy, Isohunt and MyBittorrent for new episodes of tv shows
• Fill in the current season and episode you are watching. Ted will automatically find new episodes that you have not seen yet
• Built-in support for all mainstream shows (24, Lost, Topgear, Desperate Housewives, the Simpsons, South Park, etc.)
• Add your own shows to Ted
• Use keywords to filter out fakes and unwanted versions of episodes
• Saves torrents of new shows to your harddisk and optionally opens the torrents in your favourite torrent client