MSN Video Download

MSN Video Download  apparently went live today with a choice of two membership types  Premium and Basic.  Premium is $19.95 a year and has more content than the free Basic membership.  Not wanting to commit myself to a membership yet I signed up for the Basic membership, thinking I could load some videos on to the miniSD card in my smartphone....

Sign up was easy, I used my passport account, agreed to the terms and installed the download software.  The download status page showed content was downloading from Fox Sports.  In order to sync content to my phone I needed a smart playlist so I followed the instructions to download one.  This was the first problem, the instructions used Windows Media Player 9 and I'm using Windows Media Player 10, a little strange, but not a huge problem.  With the smart playlist in place I thought I'd be good to go...

That wasn't going to be the case though.  I started by trying to play a video in Media Player directly and got prompted for a username and password which was being requested by "admin.theplatform.com" not "msnvideodownloads.com".  I tried my Passport email address and password which might not have been a great idea, but it didn't work anyway.  Meanwhile I could see that Activesync had been trying to sync the content to my phone so I checked the Sync page in WMP.  Nothing had been synced, instead  there was an error message "Windows Media Player can not synchronize the protected file.  Protected files can not be converted to the required quality level or format".

Now I have almost half a gigabyte of content (and it's still getting downloaded) and I can't watch any of it.  If anyone gets this working I'd love to know how.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2005
    I would give it a try but even after making the necessary changes for ActiveX and Windows Media Player 10 to be used in Mozilla Firefox, the site still wants me to install Windows Media Player 10.

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2005
    I had a similar experience, with the "Protected File error" I am using the SMT 5600, I wonder if it is device specific, Anyone tried with the Pocket PC OS?

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2007
    PingBack from http://feeds.maxblog.eu/item_246673.html

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2008
    PingBack from http://music.247blogging.info/?p=4051

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2009
    PingBack from http://toenailfungusite.info/story.php?id=3731