Monica Partridge, a Los Angeles-based Web master, loves her iPod music player but hates the iTunes music store and organizer.

"When it rips music," or copies songs to her computer, she says, it "rips them in that weird format" that only iTunes uses. So, Ms. Partridge skips iTunes altogether.

Digital music and movies have rapidly become the building blocks of the future entertainment industry -- in part, because of the potential ease with which they can be delivered, played and moved about. But potential is the key word here: So far, they've come with new kinds of restrictions, incompatibilities and frustrations never dreamed of in the analog world.

While music represents the most widespread compatibility problem, there are countless others. A memory card that works with one brand of digital camera won't necessarily work with another. A Sony PlayStation game won't run on a Microsoft Xbox. Many owners of DVD recorders have had to learn to buy discs in the correct format for their machines -- DVD RAM, DVD+R, or DVD-R -- although, thanks to new recorders that work with more than one format, this is less of a problem than it was a few years ago.

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