As much as I love the way technology’s making entertainment more portable, I can’t help getting frustrated that each provider seems to have a different file format and none of them play nicely with each other. My iPod won’t play music I copied from CD onto my hard drive using Windows format. Windows Media Center won’t play iTunes, either. My cell phone purportedly doubles as an a mp3 player, but it refuses to play music from iTunes or Windows, requiring me to instead purchase songs from Verizon that I’ve already paid for elsewhere. And don’t get me started on the whole frustration of trying to burn a kids show from cable TV — for which we pay an outrageous sum every month — so my son can watch it in the mini-van later that day.

Meanwhile, a quick call to my cell phone provider to ask why my phone won’t play my iTunes reveals that, as far as the phone company’s concerned, wanting to listen to my music on the multi-function phone they sold me means I’m a file-stealing felon. Say what? That’s right: they intentionally limit playing to their file format so they know I’ve paid for the file… or, more accurately, I’ve paid them for it.

Naturally, I’m a bit miffed over the whole thing. As a consumer, I didn’t fork over money just to play a song via iTunes or my iPod (for which I also paid): I wanted the right for me to play it any time, any where, on any device. Ditto for those CDs and DVDs I’ve bought as well as the shows I watch on cable. If I’m paying $50 per month to get cable into my home so I can watch reruns of “Absolutely Fabulous” then why shouldn’t I be the one to decide what device I’ll watch them on?

Faced with this annoyance — and an increasingly on-the-go lifestyle as VH and I travel to see our ailing parents — we’ve been looking into ways to liberate our favorite forms of entertainment. We aren’t interested in ripping off artists or violating laws against file-swapping. We just want our entertainment devices to do what they’d promised: play our stuff!

Until recently, making that happen was a nightmare in itself. The majority of conversion programs are limited to a mere handful of formats, and as we’ve discovered they lose a lot of quality in the process. There’s even more quality loss when trying to burn them to CD. Ditto for programs that claim to make transferring recorded shows from DVR to DVD easier: they results quite often look like those bootleg movies made in China by some guy holding up a camcorder in a theater. Awful.

This past weekend we learned about Blaze Media Pro which turns out to have a number of uses way beyond the standard convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV function. As an all-in-one audio and video converter, the program recognizes and handles dozens of formats and offers a solution on converting protected AAC (read: iTunes) files. Once converted, the program also includes CD burning software so you can back up all of your songs by an artist (regardless of format) for safekeeping.

The program’s advanced video features aren’t limited to DVD burning software: it also offers advanced video capture and editing. Although I’ve yet to figure out a one-step solution to converting shows captured on my DVR to a format that will play on my cell phone, the program’s intuitive enough that a little exploration and some inventiveness makes it happen. It’s a slick program that’s jam-packed with so many features it makes the other ones look weak in comparison.

Interested? Check out their free 15-day download. You’ll be hooked.