10 Gallon Hat I can’t believe I ate the whole thing

Amazon Unbox – Not Super Fantastic.. just barely fantastic.

Last week I wrote up a blathering chronicle of how Amazon Unbox was the digital media king and had made Blu-Ray and DVDs obsolete with its DRM free (sort of) downloads of all the latest movies and TV.  While parts of my story were true, but I have to digress a little- I take back a big part of what I said.  The downloads are not portable!  Not in the least bit, which is extremely deceiving considering they play in Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center and look like good old fashion Windows Media Files.  Not even with the Zune, it is partly Microsoft’s fault for creating a walled garden for the Zune.

And definitely Amazon’s fault for creating another proprietary format wrapped in some ugly DRM(!!!) to keep them from being portable, unless of course you have one of the 8 obscure MP3 players that actually will support them. Basically these players have a mini version of Amazon’s player – which is the opposite of portable and not user-friendly.  Aaaargghh. While Amazon does specify the players it supports (in fine print) I think they should have definitely made this more clear in the Amazon player, when you are prompted to download a portable version of your recently purchased movies or TV shows.

Plus, 12 of the 20 players supported are old and not even for sale anymore, not even on Amazon.  So, unless you own the Archos 404 from 2006, you are pretty much out of luck.

Stupid Amazon, and Stupid Movies.  Figure it out already and make it easy for us.