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Review: ZapStation Media Box
Let me get this out of the way right up front. It's just too damn expensive. They want $1500 for what is essentially just a stripped-down PC with a 30-gig hard drive. You're paying twice what you would pay to build this system yourself. You're paying that premium to get a nice pretty box to put into your stereo rack, and for software that ties the whole thing together. Now I'm a vain person and will pay extra to have something pretty in my stereo, but not $1500.
The device itself is designed to be that media convergence box that will change the world. Sorta. It is a sort of swiss army knife for media. It connects to your TV (but has SVGA output too) and ethernet. It has a webbrowser, the ability to stream a variety of video and audio sources. It can play DVDs. It can rip CDs. It can import them from an FTP server. You can snarf MPEGs and watch them easily on your TV. It has a wireless keyboard as well as a regular remote so you can control it easily from your couch.
The ZapStation has an optical audio cable, as well as standard RCA audio ports (although only one will work at a time and you need to power cycle to activate the other). It has composite and S-VHS video outs (same note about power cycling) as well as SVGA. And ethernet.
Let's talk about what most people will use this box for: Ripping CDs and playing MP3s. It works quite well for this. Ripping is quick and several options are provided for ripping into MP3 or WMA formats. The ethernet port happily uses DHCP and handles CDDB lookups on the tracks. Nice and simple. You can rip CDs and play them back at the same time, but doing so reduces the rip process to 1x. Normally it rips twice that fast. Simply playing CDs is easy and they sound good.
Fetching audio from other sources is not so simple. You use FTP, but I had problems using anonymous FTP servers. It didn't like symlinks very much. And trying to do larger imports caused the whole unit to freeze up solid and require a power cycle. Very bad.
Eventually I had to import MP3s in blocks of a few hundred megs at a time just to prevent the machine from hanging. Very uncool.
My imported tracks lost their order. They all had ID3 tags and every MP3 player I know of respects those numbers... but importing a couple hundred albums only to lose the order of the songs is very annoying. Ripped CDs retained their order just fine. Once while importing tracks I somehow got out of the import menu. From then on, I couldn't do anything because I was importing -- but I couldn't stop importing because I couldn't go back to the import menu! Only a power cycle fixed it!
It has USB ports for future expandibility and hopefully for feeding MP3 portables. I don't have anything to test, which doesn't matter because I don't think the current version supports much.
Playing back audio is relatively easy. You navigate to my audio, and select playlists or albums or artists. There is no easy way to say 'Shuffle my entire collection' -- which I find annoying since that is how I usually listen to music. I like not hearing the same song for weeks at a time. Nifty little visualization graphics are available, but I sure wish they were fancier then they are, and included an option for full screen visualization.
I wish they were available for the regular CD player too -- the box really separates audio types, but to a user sound should just be sound and managed and played back in the same ways. The worst part is that I hear a 'pop' in between each track when listening to audio from the optical cable. Amazingly annoying. If they had the functionality of xmms-crossfade it would be super smooth.
There are a lot of problems with the UI. The screen is cluttered and it is sometimes difficult to figure out where you are going. Some simple changes (making the menu font bigger for example) would help, but it's just confusing since audio sources (streams, local mp3s, CDs) are all in separate parts of the system instead of clustered together. If I want music, I should be presented with my music, and not be forced to worry about the source. As an experiment I unplugged the ethernet, and was unable to navigate menus to the DVD player.
There are other problems too, like there is no good concept of a queue, so once you start a playlist (be it artist, genre, album, or playlist) you can't change it. So there's no way for me to queue up the next album I want to listen to without stopping the current playlist. Very frusterating.
The web browser works quite nicely. It's a little difficult to get used to it, but you can cook right along once you get used to not having a mouse. Most pages I visited rendered fine, although plug-ins cause problems. You can import audio and video very easily from the web.
Video playback is the unique thing here. You can store MPEG files just like MP3s and watch them on your TV. It does a pretty good job playing them back. I watched an MPEG of the Buffy musical a reader hooked me up with (I don't get UPN. Cursed cable company thinks UPN isn't a broadcast station like FOX and NBC so they want me to subscribe to 'Extended Basic Cable,' except that I have a dish. The FCC and the cable companies conspire to prevent me from watching my Buffy!) It's very convenient, and it looks as good as you would expect: the quality is dependant on the quality of the file you are playing back. There's not a lot of room on the box, so the fact that the video is organized as a simple list isn't a huge hindrence. It would get hard to find items in that list if you could fit more then a few dozen shows on the unit.
Notable here is the lack of formats. For a box like this, DivX, sorensen QuickTime, and Real should all be supported. But they aren't -- we just have MPEG. Supposedly at least some of these formats will be available later. But it's really unfortunate since these days MPEG is sort of bloated by the bitrate standards of the newer formats.
Lastly the unit functions as a DVD Player ... poorly. I found playback to be much brighter then my DVD player. Also it was pixelated and jerky. The audio quality was quite good, but my reciever was decoding the surround sound so its hard to mess that up :) The aspect ratio tool screws up non-anamorphic content. If you tell the system that you have a 16:9 screen, it slashes resolution on 4:3 content to make it fit ... which looks like crap if your TV can handle the translation itself. The lack of component output make this an even worse choice for DVD playback. Perhaps the box really could have shined had they opted for a progressive output.
I guess by this point you see where I'm going. There are a variety of things that can be improved in this unit, and many of them are software changes that will likely be rolled into future versions. I reported all of my bugs to Zap. The folks there are really nice and I'm sure the bugs will be fixed soon enough.
As it stands, if the ZapStation was $500, and the code was open source, I'd have no problem recommending this to someone who wanted to hack a bit. Or if you have tons of dough, and just want to rip your CDs and play them back, this is a very expensive but simple way to do it, but lockups and lack of track order made importing pretty crappy.
If you're a digital video junkie then this is a good system too, but 30G of disk space isn't much for digital video (my old 9 hour Tivo demonstrates that all to well).
Personally for my MP3 playback, a $300 PC, a $200 100G hard drive, and an AudioTron does most what this does and won't fill up any time soon. That leaves enough cash to buy a decent progressive DVD player. You could get a scan converter cheap and play back MPEGs and have 3x the space.
What could really make this worth it? The ability to rip DVDs would be amazingly cool in this box. And built in PVR functionality. And a 100G hard drive. Support for popular video formats. A touch pad on the keyboard would make navigation much easier. Progressive DVD playback and component video outs.
The box looks absolutely lovely, but the software is immature. And the pricing is that of a high end component ... and this just isn't that. The ZapStation is the jack of all trades, master of none.
So what does it do that a computer + a video capture card can't do? ... ALOT cheaper I might add!
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Its $1500 dollars now. In 3 months they'll drop that to around $799. And the Slashdot headline will read 'ZapStation now affordable'. This sort of market just begs for this kind of ploy. Sell way high to start with and recoup development costs from the early adopters with pots of cash (plus its Christmas), and then drop down to a sensible (?!) price.
The fact the media gives loads of free advertising to it when the initial production run is finished and the machine is market tested is the icing on the cake.
Examples where this has happened before? The Sony Clie, PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, lots of hifis.. if its desirable home entertainment, then this is the obvious sales plan.
Moral of the story? Wait and save.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Here are some specs for the ZapStation.
. ht ml
http://www.zapmedia.com/products/specifications
Meeting these specs could prove more challenging than one might think with "cheap PC hardware" and "a little software".
If someone from Zap is reading this, what I would like is for it to support the ogg/vorbis audio format, use DivX for video ripping, and have some kind of "expert-level" access to the underlying OS for people that want to tweak it. Oh, and get the price down under 800$.
The Xbox is the end of it for everyone in the convergence media box solution business. Think about it. Microsoft was the only one smart enough to use a console to promote DirectX (read:Windows). Now that Xbox is trickling out, they can begin working on PVR features. After that, they can start pushing the box to cablecos and satellite TV providers (provider?). They've got the money to subsidize the product down to the lowest common denominator. Anyone who is anyone will require one to watch and record TV, view DVDs, play video games, manage digital media and communicate with the rest of the convergence that is on the horizon.
Did anyone not see this coming? The Indrema thingy was the only other box close to what Xbox will do. The fact that the company died and threw all development away leads me to believe that there was Microsoft involvement.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Do you really think having the source
would improve the product?
Give me a break!
I want to buy something that plugs
in and works.
I don't want something I can buy
and fix myself.
They should just make it work right in the first
place.
People do not want a one component does everything system. Look at the el-cheapo stereo systems on the market. What do they all have in common? CD, cassette, tuner and all in one enclosure. Decent equipment is separate, as it should be. Say a better DVD system arrives in 2 years, but I already have a kick ass sound system. Why would I want to replace everything? Putting everything in one box is foolish. Do one thing, and do it well. A digital music system shouldn't try and do what a TiVO or a DVD player does. Granted, they share the similarities in hardware and media, but combining the two will only lead to mediocrity for both. Thats why my TiVO doesn't have a VCR deck in it, and my TV doesn't have a built in VCR.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
As much as I liked the idea of the Indrema, I never read ANYTHING that suggested there was any business potential. Just sounded like two garage guys with an enthusiastic idea that they thought would magically take off.
I seriously doubt Indrema was ever on Microsoft's radar. As a gamer *I* wasn't even interested in the thing. I just thought it'd be cool to poke around it.
I highly doubt Microsoft had anything to do with it's failure. Indrema basically self destructed.
"Derp de derp."
The specifications page lists the device as running Linux, and has WMA in the list of Supported Formats under audio/video playback and audio recording. From what I've heard on here, I thought this was all but impossible. Confirmations?
Cheers,
levine
I used to work for ZapMedia. It's a great company, but (at least until recently) a very poorly-led one. While I was there the company went from 40 people to 120 and then down to 20. They blew through some $20 million in capital. I was laid off in the 5th round of layoffs (can you believe that)?
We were almost bought out several times. The box was even going to be marketed as a Harmon Kardon DMC-100 box, until we ran out of money and decided to keep the profit margins. We talked to several companies (who I should not mention since I could get sued), but every one of the deals fell through. One of the companies even has a competing box on the market now. Another one has a PVR box for sale, which is something we all wanted to be added to the Zapstation.
When I left in September, the box still crashed a lot. I wish them the best of luck. From the sound of this review, they're going to need it.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Sounds like you could use a laptop and Show Shifter. This allows you to use it as a PVR, play MP3's. You could always download some sort of MP3 / DVD ripper / encoder. Use this with IrMan and any remote. And you have pretty much the same thing.
Plus with a laptop you can take it to your friends and move it anywhere else in the house. And any recorded shows can be watched on the move.
Fast forward to the month of August, the price was about 400 bucks, and so on.
I know this because I know of at least one guy who got nailed by this. (not me!) He wanted to get a refund from the store for the price drop, but they only did that for the first month, not the several that had past. The guy was seriously bummed out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Simply playing CDs is easy and they sound good.
Sorry, but I'm an audio electronics engineer. Simply put, I really don't think such a compact "Swiss Army Knife" box is capable of producing decent CD sound. Maybe it's "good" compared to MP3s (*gag*), but it will almost certainly pale in comparison to high-end CD players.
Methinks Taco is getting kickbacks on ZapStation sales. "Think geek", indeed.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
yes, I think he meant s-video, but fyi, s-vhs didnt fail miserably, it just didnt have a place in the consumer market. it has been *widely* used in tv/broadcast industry for a long time. It is getting a bit long in the tooth now that more and more digital solutions are coming to market, but at this point I think it is still pretty much the standard, at least for most smaller/local tv stations. I have a cabinet full of about 50 of them I inherited from an x-girlfriend who was a producer.
sorry for the offtopic reply...
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
There's no incentive for them to bring out a competing product (Call it XBox Converge, or something else silly), for YEARS.
Microsoft is a SOFTWARE company. They are losing money on the hardware because they want to be able to sell you software. The "XBox Converge" will be a software update. If it requires new hardware to function, it will be a plug-in. Not a new console.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The FCC and the cable companies conspire to prevent me from watching my Buffy!) ;)
so they ARE good for something
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's no incentive for them to bring out a competing product
Every game that is made for Xbox becomes tied to a proprietary graphics platform. That is lots of incentive as every game sold pads the Microsoft operating system.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
There are a lot of 'boxes' that do convergance. the G4 cube was never meant for the livingroom.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It has composite and S-VHS video outs
Okay, this is one of my little pet peeves...
S-Video is the name for that connector on the back of your DVD player that looks like an old-style Apple ADB keyboard/mouse port (mini-DIN 8 connector) that carries separated ("component") video signals rather than combined as in RCA cables ("composite"). It gives you better video signal quality, and you should use it whenever you have the capability. S-Video is presumably what CmdrTaco mean to say here.
S-VHS (Super-VHS) is a videotape standard like VHS, except it defines the use of different magnetic coatings and what-not for broadcast-quality resolution on Super-VHS tapes. In addition to the wildly-expensive professional rackmount broadcast equipment, you can buy stripped-down Super-VHS VCR's these days that are priced for prosumers. The resolution is similar to Hi-8mm.
Now, you'll find that just about any SVHS VCR has S-Video connectors on it in addition to composite RCA connectors, but S-Video connectors can also be found on lots of other things that are not related to Super VHS, like miniDV camcorders.
</rant>
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
So two other similar boxes are currently offered by:
* AudioReQuest (www.request.com) built on QNX and support MP3, CD ripping, and supposedly a host of new features soon. I doubt it will support video playback of any kind since you really need a higher end graphics card than what they have in their box now.
* Imerge (www.imerge.co.uk) boxes which look really cool and promising. They were just released and will be shown at CES 2002.
Everyone has to understand that the prices WILL drop on these units...but it is VERY expensive to create the initial versions. Look at the TiVo...the 14 hour unit cost $1499 when it was first released!!! It's not a $199 (or is it $99 now) box.
It will take about a year for the prices to drop to something around $500 based on how quickly PVR boxes dropped in price. And for note some of these boxes were ORIGINALLY being sold for $800 or so...for instance the ARQ. I bought my 20GB version refurbished for $500 a while back and quickly upgraded it to 80GB.
The benefit of having a real UI over a PC interface or hacked together set of scripts is huge...the majority of the market isn't technical.
The poster asked how open-source would improve the product, and I answered. Whether or not the product is bug free and works as advertised is a separate issue from whether it is open or closed source.
And yes, obviously not all changes can be made solely in software. That doesn't reduce the value of having available source to zero.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That includes all software? You're using Windows 2000 - how much did you pay for that? And the various playback functions and formats, plus the UI to tie them all together into a coherent package - did you find all that for a reasonable price (or for free) or are you writing them yourself?
Keep in mind that even when you can download some components for free (realplayer, quicktime, etc), you won't be allowed to redistribute them for free. If you are claiming that you could "build a ZapStation for a lot less" you have to remember the licensing fees for whatever you didn't write yourself.
(Likely this is why they went with Linux, not for "geek brownie points". They still had to license some things like the Windows Media codec.)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README