Ram brandt's List: HW_MISCELLANEOUS

• Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is a new protocol and accompanying set of drivers developed by Microsoft to connect portable devices to a Windows XP PC and synchronize digital media content between those devices and the PC. MTP is geared toward portable devices with hard drives; flash-based devices will continue to use Mass Storage Class (MSC), a broadly supported protocol whose drivers are already included with Windows XP, 2000, and Me. In general, users will have to buy new devices that support MTP, although some existing devices will be upgradeable.
• all MTP-compatible devices use drivers that Microsoft is shipping with Windows Media Player 10, and users will be able to perform all transfer and synchronization functions from within the Player.
• all MTP-compatible devices will support a new feature called AutoSync, which lets users configure Windows Media Player 10 to automatically transfer all newly acquired or ripped content to a device whenever it's connected. AutoSync is customizable so that the Player will transfer only content that meets certain criteria (songs rated four stars or higher, for instance), a capability that becomes important as media libraries on a PC grow beyond the hard drive capacity of a particular device. (MSC-based devices will also support AutoSync when used with Windows Media Player 10.)
• MTP allows the PC to recognize a device's limitations, such as capacity or lack of support for certain file types. As new content is added to the PC, the Player will automatically transcode it (change the file type or compression ratio) in the background if necessary so it will be ready for transfer the next time the user connects the device. Transcoding was previously a manual process and was particularly unwieldy for transferring content such as recorded TV programs, for which the transcode time exceeds the playback time.
• Today, changes made to file properties (such as a user rating) on a device cannot be propagated back to the PC when the device is reconnected. MTP-compatible devices won't have this limitation.
• All MTP-compatible devices will appear in the My Computer window for easy configuration (just as MSC-based devices appear as a separate drive today).
• MTP is necessary to support Microsoft's latest DRM scheme, which enables new scenarios such as transferring subscription-based content to portable devices. (MTP is used to synchronize licenses between the PC and devices, among other functions.)

• Based on PTP

    

  MTP is based on Microsoft's Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP), which was introduced with Windows XP to ease the transfer and discovery of images from digital cameras.

    

  In theory, Microsoft could have based its new technology for portable players on MSC, which is more broadly supported. However, Microsoft chose to work with PTP because MSC cannot support certain features, such as the following:

    
   
  • Hot unplug, the ability to unplug a device in the middle of a transfer without losing all material that had previously been transferred
   
  • Keeping the device's user interface active while it is connected to the PC
   
  • Controlling device functions from Windows
   
  • The ability to transfer data over IP networks (a future scenario—the first set of MTP-compatible devices will connect only via USB 2.0).
   
    

  In addition to MSC, MTP joins at least two other synchronization protocols used to transfer digital media to portable devices: iSync, used by Apple's iPod, and SyncML, a standard proposed by the Open Mobile Alliance for synchronizing data between a PC and portable devices, such as mobile phones or handheld computers. Microsoft has no plans to support these protocols in the Windows Media Player, meaning that users will still have to install and use separate software to transfer material to devices that use these protocols.

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• The Media Transfer Protocol  is a set of custom extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) devised by   Microsoft,  to allow the protocol to be used for devices other than digital cameras, for example digital audio players such as MP3  players, and other portable media devices, for example portable video players.  Media Transfer Protocol (commonly referred to as MTP)  is part of the "Windows Media"   framework and thus closely related  to Windows Media Player.  Support for Media Transfer Protocol in Windows XP requires the installation of Windows Media   Player 10 or Windows Media Player 11. Windows Vista, however, offers support for MTP natively – putting this protocol  on a par with other protocols such as USB MSC.
• MTP enables Windows XP, Vista and any other supported OSs to recognize the device as a standard media device.  Using the MTP Function Driver, users can communicate with their USB media device through any standard multimedia  application without the need for additional software on the host side.  The MTP protocol is designed for content exchange between a portable media device and a PC,  as well as command and control of the device remotely from the PC.
• The host connecting to an   MTP device  is called an MTP Initiator whereas the device itself is an MTP Responder. The main purpose of the protocol is to transfer media files and associated metadata  to/from devices, with optional additional support for remote control of the device,  reading and setting of device parameters such as special   DRM-related device parameters  for restricted content.
• Windows XP supports MTP if   Windows Media Player   10 or later is installed. Windows Vista  natively implements MTP.

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• This will show how to solve the MTP Media Player prompt up on the new USB devices, which disallow you from browsing the devices content using Windows Explorer. I will show you the fastest way to disable the MTP Media Player, without hurting anything and you could also enable MTP Media Player later as well.
• The main purpose of the protocol is to transfer media files and associated metadata to/from devices, with optional additional support for remote control of the device, reading and setting of device parameters
• If you notice the MTP Media Player autorun, only allow media player to manage your device.

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• The Media Transfer Protocol is a devised set of custom extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP).^[1] Whereas PTP was designed for downloading photographs from digital cameras, Media Transfer Protocol supports the transfer of music files on digital audio players and media files on portable media players, as well as personal information on personal digital assistants.
• Media Transfer Protocol (commonly referred to as MTP) is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player. Windows Vista has built-in support for MTP. Support for Media Transfer Protocol in Windows XP requires the installation of Windows Media Player 10 or higher.
• A main reason for using MTP rather than for example the USB mass-storage device class (MSC) is that the latter operates at the granularity of a mass storage device block (usually in practice, a FAT block), rather than at the logical file level. In other words, the USB mass storage class is designed to give a host computer undifferentiated access to bulk mass storage, such as compact flash, rather than to a file system, which might be safely shared with the target device (except for specific files which the host might be modifying/accessing). In practice, therefore, when a USB host computer has mounted an MSC partition, it assumes absolute control of the storage, which then may not be safely modified by the device without risk of data corruption until the host computer has severed the connection.
• MTP and PTP specifically overcome this issue by making the unit of managed storage a local file rather than an entire (possibly very large) unit of mass storage at the block level. In this way, MTP works like a transactional file system - either the entire file is written/read or nothing. The storage media is not affected by failed transfers.

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• The USB mass storage device class, otherwise known as USB MSC or UMS, is a protocol that allows a Universal Serial Bus (USB) device to become accessible to a host computing device, to enable file transfers between the two. To the host device, the USB device appears similar to an external hard drive, enabling drag-and-drop file transfers.

   

  The USB mass storage device class comprises a set of computing communications protocols defined by the USB Implementers Forum that run on the Universal Serial Bus. The standard provides an interface to a variety of storage devices.

   
   
   
   
  
   An USB flash drive like this one will typically implement the USB mass storage device class.
   
   
   

  Some of the devices that are connected to computers via this standard include:

   
   
  • external magnetic hard drives
   
  • external optical drives, including CD and DVD reader and writer drives
   
  • portable flash memory devices
   
  • adapters bridging between standard flash memory cards and USB connections
   
  • digital cameras
   
  • various digital audio players and portable media players
   
  • card readers
   
  • PDAs
   
  • mobile phones
   
   

  Devices which support this standard are referred to as MSC (Mass Storage Class) devices. While MSC is the official abbreviation, UMS (Universal Mass Storage) has become common in online jargon.