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New Philips eXpanium Will Use 3" CDs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the finally- dept.

SpunOne writes: "Phillips is gearing up to release their new eXpanium mp3 player. Unlike most players in the past that use proprietary storage technology, Phillips is turning to the use of those cute little 3 inch CDs that have been around forever, but never really used for much. Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter. Phillips even has a beta test available if you're interested in giving it a try." If you should get into the beta group (50 people), why not write up a report for us on this little device? If it only played .ogg files, I would try to pre-order from somewhere.

6 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Re:proprietary storage technology Yep by q-soe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    umm

    The prob with compact flash and smart meida is the formats arent proprietary but the vendors write data in such a way that it is hard to interchange the cards (Sony and Kodak for one example) plus they are expensive (im outside the US)

    Memory Stick is a proprietary format belonging to Sony - as yet i dont believe there has been any other vendor making either a memory stick product or a memory stick - thats as proprietary as you want.

    PS Proprietary is when a tech is one companies only - the amouont of products on the market means very little if the company hasnt made it an open standard.

    --
    I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
  2. Most Portible CD Players these days play MP3s now by ryanw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I bought a cheap $60.00 cd player from Fry's Electronics the other day that plays regular AudioCD's and also can read DATA cd's with MP3's in the root directory. Works great.

    Ryan

  3. Re:Ogg support by Hobbex · · Score: 2, Interesting


    Honestly, I don't think you want players that are updatable (the Philips site says that Rush, their solid state player, is), because you'll never know when they'll try to sneak down the latest User Hostile fuckware with an upgrade, being the slaves of the evil industry that they are (no, they probably wouldn't make a player suddenly stop reading MP3s for some encrypted format, but they could stop reading files with certain watermarks (the SDMI plan)).

    Forget hardware players - they are too easy targets for control by the powers of evil. Liberation lies in software players on generic handhelds - which can play OGG files without having to go begging to some company like Windows users...

  4. Ogg support by norculf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is the trouble with Ogg Vorbis. It isn't supported by these things. If they had rewriteable firmware, it would be possible to hack support into them, but as far as I know, not many of them do this.

    I would rather use my CD player anyway. A real CD sounds better anyway. It is also a simple matter to make an expendable copy of a CD so the original isn't in danger of theft or damage.

  5. No fixed point .ogg decoders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    One of the main reasons that this type of player doesn't have .ogg support is because the only .ogg format decoders currently available require floating point math. This is no good for the low cost DSPs or embedded processors (ARM, MIPS etc) which typically power this type of device. Starting a project to write an optimised fixed point .ogg decoder would be far more useful than joining the beta program and moaning :-)

  6. Re:29 Percent of a full CD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    3 inch CDs = 185 Megabytes


    5 inch CDs = 702 Megabytes(if you buy the right kind)



    I like my mp3 cd player that plays 5 inch cd's. It can also play 3 inch cds, but I don't have any.



    But the new phillips can only play 3 inch cds. Sounds like a ripoff to me.(please note, I don't care if it's smaller)