Unlike most other portable media players on the market, the device will play EPAC files instead of MP3 (Motion Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer 3) files, the companies said.

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MP3.com in the past six months has gained notoriety as a proponent of MP3 (Motion Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer 3), a format for compressing audio data so that it can be downloaded easily over a network.

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Some have even gone as far as to state that Sony's strategy of using MPEG-2 and uncompressed PCM audio on single-layer Blu-ray discs may have required too much video compression, resulting in early releases that don't match the sharpness of VC-1 encoded movies available on HD DVD.

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