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Domain: zvue.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to zvue.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:Illusory benefits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on iPods Valuable in the College Classroom?

    An iPod killer you say?.... Maybe like the Zvue?

  2. ZVUE Solid State MPEG4 Player by hyperventilate · · Score: 1 · on 5.5 oz. MPEG-4/Audio Portable From Archos
    There is a small, light SOLID STATE FLASH player that doesn't suffer the hard disk failure modes.

    The ZVUE

    Now that 1 Gig SD cards are $140 who needs a hard disk.

    It plays 1.5 MB/minute so a 256 MB SD card holds a movie and a half.

  3. how about the Zvue ? by for_usenet · · Score: 1 · on MSFTs "iPod Killer" Readied for Europe

    This item was mentioned a few weeks ago on Slashdot. I would say at the price, compatibility, and use of standard media cards and batteries, this is a killer for MS's device... ;-)

  4. Re:Too much hype... by No_Weak_Heart · · Score: 3, Informative · on ZVUE's $99 Video and MP3 Player
    Yet another memory card format to contend with, ugh.

    And yet another video codec. ugh indeed.

  5. Too much hype... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful · on ZVUE's $99 Video and MP3 Player
    Lessee, three links on the same page to "Order Your ZVUE Now!" ... Link to the Player, more "Order Your ZVUE Now!" links, (I see it arrives for the 2003 holiday shopping season, looks like old news.) The FAQ covers some stuff. This thing probably sucks power when watching video, so "runs for hours on 4 AA batteries" probably means audio, not video. It's probably pretty heavy, too, but I couldn't find weight or whether it has a belt clip.

    Uses Secure Digital/MMC cards rather than Compact Flash, but looks very cool.

    Yet another memory card format to contend with, ugh.

    Pretty hyped site. Little on useful information. :-/

  6. HandHeld's Personal Video Players by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Neat Stuff In Sin City: CES 2004
    Some of my coworkers were at CES this year.... We make Hanheld Personal Video Players which can play videos, MP3's, and display .jpg's... All for only $99.00!! Yes, it's a color screen, yes it's very good quality... and that's just the first version!

    It's a pretty cool little device... Myself and another coworker were at MacWorld, and my coworker told me that he was talking with a friend of his from Apple... The Apple guy said that he had seen at least a few of these, but his eyes bugged out when he found out it was only $99. heh heh heh....

    Check it out... http://www.zvue.com

  7. How About This for Under $100? by HardCase · · Score: 1 · on Wired: Sony Prototyping Personal Video Player
    This month's edition of the IEEE Spectrum has an article about the ZVUE, a portable movie and MP3 player. The article is pay to view on the web (unless you're an IEEE member), but the player's web site is here. Alas, it has a proprietary CODEC. It also seems to me that I read some kind of blurb about "security through obscurity", although I could be mistaken. Here's the text from the IEEE's article:

    Putting the Move Back in Movies

    A personal video player puts films in the palm of your hand for US $99

    By Steven M. Cherry

    Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretches ahead for miles. You're hot, tired, and the kids are fidgeting in the back seat. They're too young for Game Boys. You used to long for one of the big expensive DVD players mounted below the roof. But now you reach into your purse for the ZVUE, a US $99 handheld video player.

    About the same size and shape as a Game Boy, the ZVUE has the added advantage that, unlike a DVD player, a child--or you--can carry it around and watch it on a long airplane ride or in a doctor's waiting room.

    Yes, the ZVUE player's movie screen is very small, but then size didn't keep Nintendo's Game Boy and its ilk from becoming hugely popular among the same 8- to 18-year-old set at which this device is aimed. The ZVUE plays movies, television shows, and music videos with a clarity that will surprise adults and captivate the youngsters.

    From HandHeld Entertainment Inc. (San Francisco), the ZVUE relies on a 2.5-inch (diagonal) thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display and stores its programs on a Secure Digital Multimedia card already popular for handheld consumer electronics, including digital cameras. These so-called SD cards come with capacities of 8 to 256 MB--at roughly one minute per megabyte, the largest cards can hold two full two-hour movies each.

    A major part of the ZVUE development involved a proprietary encoding scheme, which HandHeld Entertainment calls its HHe codec, that fiercely compresses programs at a 100 to 1 ratio. Nonetheless, the ZVUE plays video with none of the jerkiness (using only a few frames per second) or fuzziness (using just a small number of pixels per frame) one might expect.

    None of those usual problems could be seen when I watched Toy Story 2 on a preproduction demo unit that company CEO Nathan Schulhof brought to the IEEE Spectrum office in mid-August. The 24-bit color picture, the same as on a conventional computer color display, was crisp, and the figures moved as smoothly as in the best video games. A 128-MB SD card, holding a two-hour movie, costs about $50.

    A proprietary codec can be the kiss of death for something like a media player. Sales of the player start out small, so few film distributors encode their movies for it. With only a few movies available, device sales languish and the cycle continues. Aware of this chicken-and-egg problem, Schulhof is licensing his codec to other manufacturers. With more versions of ZVUE out there, more movies should be available for them.

    Additionally, for those who already have movies languishing on their hard drives in the MPEG-4 format, HandHeld will soon release a software package for converting these files into a form compatible with its codec. (Note to Schulhof: a conversion from DivX would be nice, too.) Burn the result onto an SD card via the device's USB connection and your kids will have another movie for the ZVUE.

    The 75-gram unit plays for up to eight hours on four AA batteries and has a slot for the SD card. The device comes with only one set of headphones but a port for a second pair, so both of the little tykes in the back seat can share sound as well as pictures without your having to listen to Shrek for the hundredth time. First units are expected to show up in Toys "R" Us stores in the United States this month, in time for the end-of-year holiday season.

    ZVUE is being manufactured in Hong Kong by Eastern Asia Technology