Windows Media Player just got moved to the naughy list.

So my wife got one of these little jumpoffs from her Dad for Xmas:

http://www.amazon.com/Philips-Flash-Player-3-5-Inch-Screen/dp/B0016763ES/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262098303&sr=1-4

Sweet, right? She has an iPod already, so we agreed that we could just load this little goober up with movies to watch on the treadmill/airplane trips/camel rides across the Kalahari*. So being the good husband I am, I queued up about 8-10 movies on BitTorrent~, let my computer get at the downloads overnight, and got down to the nitty gritty of loading them on to Kat's player the next day. Should be easy, right+?

Wrong. With Windows Vista, nothing's ever easy.

So here's a rundown of the grueling journey^ that was loading the GoGear with movies:
-First, I took all 8 movies, threw them on an external harddrive, and transferred them to my wife's computer (the GoGear software only works on a PC; my computer is a Mac).
-Next, I tried to convert them to the optimal resolution/dimensions/file type for the GoGear using the software that game with the player. FAIL. The software won't convert/recognize .m4v files (which I guess are either too technologically advanced or too iTunes-friendly for Microsoft to bother with it).
-I went back to my computer and used Quicktime to convert the movies to 'self contained movies' aka .mov files. Great, not too bad, but takes about 30 minutes to render them all. Fine. I'm patient.
-30 minutes to kill: take a [CENSORED], fold some clothes, walk my dog, read Atlas Shrugged. Twice.
-After the files had converted, I used the external HD to move them back to wifey's computer.
-EUREKA! The GoGear software can convert these! HOOOORAY!
-Files start converting, estimated time to finish: 30 hours?!?!?!?!?! Ugh.
-3 hours into the conversion, my wife's computer crashed and all the progress was lost. [CENSORED]
-With anger swelling from deep within my loins, I restarted the conversion, got in the car, and drove to Hilton Head for Xmas with the family. When we returned a few days later... FILES ARE DONE! HOOOOOOOOOOORAY!
-So, now just gotta load them to the player using Windows Media Player. This should be easy, but it's not - why? WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER IS HORRIBLE SOFTWARE! I can't load the movies without WMP trying to load every piece of importable media on the hard drive. After trying to figure out this horrible piece of [CENSORED] software for 20 minutes, I quit and decided to try another avenue. After some searching and 'strategery'...
-JACKPOT! I can open the GoGear as an external disk in My Computer and manage it that way. I delete all the [CENSORED] that WMP threw on the thing, add the movies, and blam-o, nice little movie player for my wife.

The moral of this story?

What can be done in iTunes on a Mac in 30 seconds takes approximately 8 days and 800 headaches to get done in Windows Vista. Also, Windows Media Player is the most unintuitive, least user friendly, and most mind boggling frustrating piece of software ever written.

Windows Vista, I hate you.**


*As I write this, this commercial came on:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFEio0OCWek&feature=video_response    best. commercial. ever.
~Legal notice: I have never downloaded a pirated movie on BitTorrent; this post does not refer to downloading pirated movies using BitTorrent; I am not a crook.
+I put one of the movies on my iPod Touch via iTunes; it took approximately 30 seconds.
^Grueling journey = big [CENSORED] pain in the [CENSORED].
**So this post wasn't explicitly about my computer, but alas, it's about Vista - the operating system that I can't get rid of because AIMS won't work on Windows 7.