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Portable CD-RW/DVD Player
BugNuker writes "If your CD/MP3 player wasn't enough, you have to check this out. Sony has released this all in one media device that can play mp3's, wma's, cd's, and DVD's... yes, DVD's. It can be hooked up to your computer, and be used as a CD-RW and then hooked up to your TV, and play your favorite DVD's. But can it play my mp3's recorded on my DVD? Ultimate media device I would say, same size as a personal cd player. Comes with a Memory Stick expansion slot, a rechargeable battery and a USB 2.0/1.1 interface." There's a picture. It's cute. And expensive.
I have seen portable DVD players for under $300.
This thing sounds like a bargain to me.
I've been waiting for one of these for like 4 years, ever since I bought a Sony Glasstron. For those that don't know those are the "glasses" with the equivelent of a 56 inch tv inside. Now I can watch p0rn on the airplane without my seat-mate complaining about the moaning.
But does it play Ogg Vorbis?
I am alone, yet I also surf the universal backwash of undifferentiated Being, which is LOVE.
Why not just get a notebook with the same features? It won't be that much more expensive and would be a whole lot more useful than a portable DVD drive without a screen.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
"When away from the computer, the drive then works as a stand-alone CD player that can play standard audio CDs, and MP3 or WAV files from a CD, DVD or Memory Stick."
Damn, sure sounds like it to me.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I just replaced my son's Sony mini-disk player (on a Circuit City warranty) and it is slick. Why don't we see more for the mini-disk here in the US?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Can it play them? If it's "all" in one, and i'm payin 300 clams, i sure as hell hope it gets up and gets me a beer too.
I wonder how Sony's Movie and music branch feel about this. On one side you have Sony telling people to burn DVD's cd-rw's and other stuff. While the other side says don't do that.
This thing looks neat! BUT considering Sony's use of DRM in it's players, I wonder just how useful this thing really is?
-------
Bite Me Fanboy!!
What happens in there? Does one team produce cool stuff and then try and sneak it out before the music side get their claws into it? Or is this clearly a case of two different companies (or should I say cultures and ideals) releasing products under the same name?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Sony press release: http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/2873
= 185
Product page: http://www.storagebysony.com/cd-rw/product.asp?id
when you have something as sexy as the MZ-N1 would anybody want something this big to lug around.
actually, a better why...
why do americans not like/use minidisc players? i noticed that when i was over there about a month ago - everyone had clunkly cd-size walkmen. in london mini-disc players are continuing to become more ubiqitous and i would assume for two reasons:
1) size
2) re-recordable
does this just not go down well in the US?
i mean, discover the sony mz-n1....
I mean, seriously, is this such a bargain?
If you want a DVD player, you're much better off going with a dedicated unit for the same $$$. It will give you infinitely better picture quality.
If you want an MP3/etc player, head for an iPod or that new Creative device. It'll be smaller (and even the cheapest version will still have as much memory as a DVD), and the battery life will be better because it doesn't have to spin the damn dvd around all the time.
One of those cases of big wow factor because of convergence/size/cuteness, but when you look at it objectively - jack of all trades, master of none.
-- james
This is sort of off topic, but the way that Sony is pushing their Memory Stick technology (it's in almost all their products now), you'd think that Sony would be focusing more on getting larger capacity Memory Sticks out the door. Currently they max out at 128MB, while you can get 1GB compactflash cards for pretty cheap. I have a 4MP Sony digicam, and it fills a 128MB stick pretty quickly. I think I remember Sony was planning to release the 256MB Memory Stick at the end of last year, with plans to take it up to 4GB(!). Well, Sony, we're almost at the end of this year, and 256MB sticks are nowhere to be seen. Not to mention a 128MB stick is still way too overpriced, even by Sony's licensee's. You have to wonder if Sony is having problems manufacturing higher density Memory Sticks. However, they are still pushing the technology, so maybe that is a good sign.
Where does it say this plays WMAs? I couldn't find it in the article. What I did see is that it provides enough playback for 1.5 hours of DVD, so less than a lot of movies.
This should be a nice alternative to car DVD players which are always ridiculously expensive.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
...it can't be hooked up directly to a TV to view a DVD. Only through a computer linkage can it that be done. This product will be totally cool when I can take it to my luddite grandmother's house where there is no computer and hook it up to her TV while she's baking brownies.
Only then will it rock!
This would be even more wonderful if instead of, or along with their proprietary Memory Stick they had offered another form of memory expansion slot. Why does Sony seem so with it, and yet still hold on to old, starving-on-the-teet technology like a perpetual wetnurse. Did they learn nothing from Betamax?
I've always longed for those super-ultra-tiny notebooks like you find on Dynamism, but the coolest ones don't have built-in CD or DVD drives. I hate carrying around a drive just because I might need to read a cd-rom, but this little gizmo would be the perfect companion. I could use it to watch movies on the road in hotels, plus listen to music, and still play cd-roms with the computer.
The drawback of the bundled add-on CD drives that come with the notebooks is that they don't function separately - you're just lugging around a mostly useless cd-rom reader, not a CD/DVD Walkman. This thing is going to sell like hotcakes to business travelers!
What's your damage, Heather?
Can it be hacked to be regionfree? And macrovisionfree?
It won't be the ultimate player until it can also play mpeg4 video. It's only a matter of time before these become common. So many people achieved substantial mp3 music holdings, that the portable cd audio players [as well as car players, home players] began to cater to consumer demand, and offer the additional function of playing .mp3's stored in a iso9660 data track.
.avi's as a matter of course.
Soon enough, the newer dvd players will be able to play "divx"
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
I am asking myself, why do people really need a portable DVD player? Are not cdr/mp3/audio-cd disk players enough? Sounds to me just another product to make consumers pay up.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Uh oh.....
Sony isn'y going to like this!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I'm not buying another portable until I can get vorbis support. Someone please legitimize the format!
This thing plays everything (CDs as well as MP3, WAV and WMA files that are stored on CDs, DVDs or the company's own Memory Stick cards) but vorbis! Is there really more people with WAVs stored on Memory Sticks than folks who want vorbis playback?
if I burn my MP3s on a writable DVD, the battery time is to short for me to listen through it all...
Once again we return the problem issue of battery time. This seems to be the limiting factor in portable electronics today, either you can't use it long enough, or it is to heavy to be carried.
.
This thing is missing the one feature that would have made it unique as a portable device.
VCD Recording.
I understand the practical limitations that would prevent it, but if after all I'm going to hook it up to a TV, why not record?
It would have made a great adjunct to the current crop of digital CamCorders.
It's pretty (I guess depending on your estetic), but the extra utility would have put it over the top even if the list went to $500.
Of course it would have to be more reliable than my Terrapin.
supports both Macintosh and Windows platforms
They say this like there are only two.
"We got both kinds of music here - Country and Western."
"That push has intensified with the popularity of digital entertainment formats such as MP3 music files and file-sharing sites such as Napster."
Napster has been dead for what, well over a year and a half?
Do I really need a device that is borne from the efforts of a company that lives, breathes and lives the DMCA? And is the main member of the RIAA?
Fuck MP3.
Go Ogg.
Sony product page
Sony's cool new Digital Relay(TM) portable battery operated CD-RW/DVD-ROM/Memory Stick® drive burns CDs when attached to a PC or Macintosh® computer using the USB 2.0/1.1 port. Detach the drive from the computer, and you now have a portable CD player that also plays MP3 and WAV files on CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or Memory Stick media.
It plays DVD-ROMs, not DVD-Video discs. This basically is a MP3 player that can use DVDs. So you can get 4.7GB on a MP3 disc instead of 650-700 MB. I still think it's worth a link on /., but for pete's sake, RTFA before you submit, and editors, RTFA before you post!
Last July I was choosing between portable mp3 players, and saw the Sony CD-R/RW player/recorder. I must say that it looked damn ugly and too clumsy to carry around.
This new one surely beats it on looks and size, and it can play from DVDs (I think...). Back at that time, I chose the Archos Jukebox Recorder 20Gb, so it wouldn't be necessary to carry medias along (like 35 mp3 CDs), but looking at the possibility of playing DVD (that is, more than 20Gb in ONE SINGLE MEDIA), I guess this new player from Sony has a huge appeal to me.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
Sony owns the memory stick format. They're expensive and no one else uses them. Hell would freeze over before it happened, but I'd prefer something like a 128mb usb diskonkey dongle. You can use them on pretty well any computer without a separate reader. However, if my motherboard didn't have it built-in I'd want to get a usb 2.0 card before trying to burn CDs or transferring large files.
But save for those couple of issues, this seems like an incredibly versatile unit for 300 clams. I expect we'll see a lot more machines like this, and probably for a lot less cash once Samsung, et al, get in on it. And they'll probably come to market with a more useful replacement for memorystick, too.
Oh yeah: Does anyone know what, if anything, this unit has in the way of DRM support? One would not like to buy a device that was deliberately crippled in any way.
I work on a lot of older machines that don't have burners or high bandwidth connections, so having the ability to transfer large amounts of data with a portable device would be very useful. I never wanted to spend the money on one before, because I would only be able to use it for this reason. Now, I can buy one and it will also serve as a diskman, mp3 and dvd player.
Could you hook up a portable PS screen to it. THose are only like $100 and have built in speakers.?
US
UK
MP4 Video Player (DivX compatible*) JPEG/BMP Viewer MP3 Player & Recorder
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Nothing to do with it's technical abilities.
The grand thing about DVDs and CDs is that they are the same size and work of reasonably similar technologies, at least similar enough to integrate into a single device. The problem with MD is that it's size is unconventional (what with the "boxy thing" that they are in like the earlier Mac CDROMs), this is why I personally I wouldn't go for MD again (I had one, it got stolen).
Next time I think I'm going to go for a player that can play VBR (Variable Bit Rate) (Specifically -APS) MP3s from half-size CDRs. My personal favourite is <plug> this one </plug>.
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
Don't buy Sony CD-Drives.
in case the link is dead, apparently trying to access (copy-protected) CD's the wrong way with a Sony CD drive will cause a kernel oops. Possibly/Probably a flaw on purpose built-in by Sony.
What is it with the .com.com domains (check the link in the story)? zdnet.com.com? news.com.com?
.com to any .com domain?
.com.com to save money?
Is this just some office-of-redunant-redundancy-office stuff, or is there something more going on here?
com.com seems to be owned by CNET - does CNET really beleive users are so stupid that they append
Or did CNET just get tired of paying for all those second level domains, and move everything to
And what is with this CRAP of forcing the width of the page? Does no-one at CNET run more than 800x600? If my browser window is 1400 pixels wide, it is that wide FOR A REASON - USE IT!
I've heard from one webmasterbater that "Users don't want to read really long lines of text" - then tell them to RESIZE THEIR BROWSER WINDOW!
Last but not least - the device listed in the review DOES NOT HAVE A SCREEN TO VIEW DVDS! Many of the comments on this story are of the form "Cool! Now I can use this to watch my (porn|movies) and play my music". RTFA - to watch DVDs you need an external monitor. While this would be great for use in motel rooms, presentations, or other environments where a TV is at hand, it would be useless for watching movies on a (train|plane|bus|boat) since you have no way to display the video (last I'd seen, while some planes may have a screen on the seat in front of you, there is no provision for you to feed arbitrary video into it.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
From the first article:
"When connected to a Windows or Macintosh computer, the device can serve as a CD-RW drive for recording digital content or backing up computer data. When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies. "
Don't buy Sony CD-Drives.
in case the link is dead, apparently trying to access (copy-protected) CD's the wrong way with a Sony CD drive will cause a kernel oops. Possibly/Probably a flaw on purpose built-in by Sony.
(grrr sorry about double post, that'll teach me to hit "submit" instead of "preview")
The reason why MiniDisc is better than the iPod or other portable MP3 units is very simple. How much is a Flash memory card? A 128 meg card (or stick) will run you about $60 if you're very good at looking. Now, how much is a blank minidisc? Less than $2.00. If you don't ever plan on lending out your music, an MP3 player is fine and dandy.
Oh, but I almost forgot: an MP3 player is just that... a player . Not a recorder. So what happens when you want a digital copy of a concert? Or want to record a lecture? Or want to copy a friend's new CD? You're shit out of luck. With an MP3 player, you're constantly tethered to a computer if you want to expand your music collection. Minidisc doesn't have this problem.
People who think Minidiscs are poor substitutes for CD's miss the point entirely -- they are excellent substitutes for TAPES. Keep your CD player. But for portable tunes, with an option for recording, I always carry MiniDisc.
Here -about half way down the page, their "Vision" player.
From the first article in the story: "As a standalone portable player, Sony's new gadget can play back CDs as well as MP3, WAV and WMA files that are stored on CDs, DVDs or the company's own Memory Stick cards. When connected to a Windows or Macintosh computer, the device can serve as a CD-RW drive for recording digital content or backing up computer data. When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies." Check out that last sentence there.
For a portable device which records and reads CDs at 24X, rewrites CDs at 10X and reads DVDs at 8X, for less than $300 I think it isn't too bad actually. IMHO of course.
Will it play ogg files? My absolute requirement for anything I get like this is that it be able to play oggs.
Also, does it use the USB storage interface, or some other standard USB interface so I don't need funky drivers to use it under Linux?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
ADA requirements have forced Sony to release a DVD player that will allow sighted and blind people to have the same movie "watching" experience.
:-)
Or something like that
it doesnt have any VGA/RCA out ports to plug into my TV. I'm gonna get an mp3 cd player boombox this xmas. this would have been my product of choice (i dont have a dvd player yet either) had it had more out ports besides USB2.0.
This alone is a showstopper for me. Of course people will hack around and maybe get it to work. The price doesn't seem too high if it is under US$ 300 as the article mentions though.
http://mp3playerstore.com/stuff_you_need/dvd/benq. htm
m
$159 isn't too bad. There's also:
http://mp3playerstore.com/buy_it_now__/mp-2001.ht
for $64.95. Probably horrible shit construction, but not bad for the price.
Gur svggrfg funyy fheivir lrg gur hasvg znl yvir. Jr zhfg ercrng.
Now when I'm stranded on a lonely bus or subway in desperate need of a coaster, I need only to fire up my portable CDRW with the half-dead batteries and voila! A handy place to set my coffee cup down in under eight minutes. Thank you Sony Man!
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
With the low prices on writers and dvd drives this thing had better play vinyl,8 track and cassette for $300 as well as crack a beer for me too.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
From the Sony info page:
"High performance software bundle included
The MPD-AP20U comes with everything needed to start recording your own CDs, including a suite of high performance software for Windows® systems:...Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM) DVD-Video decoder software"
Now, they might just be including the software for the hell of it, but including that software makes me think it also plays DVD videos..
After reading some comments here about the fact that it doesn't support display nor Linux... I did a lil' research...
:)
;)... However, I think the Linux community will find way ....
The ZDNet article states "...When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies. "... Now that is not entirely false... As you'll see in a copy of the press release (scroll down the page to find it) here... You'll see that you can play DVD movies via the PC's USB.. "Hi-Speed USB Interface (USB 2.0/1.1)"! at 8x speed... only... as for the TV it's not supported; as stated "Output: Mini analog stereo (headphone jack) only"... So that is one fact down... Prolly in the future they may provide the means to do it via USB>DECODER>TV...
Now for the other problem... support for Linux... the press release states "System requirements: Pentium® II 233Mhz or faster PC with 32Mb RAM, HDD with 1.2Mb sustained transfer rate or faster, Direct-X supported sound card, Installed USB 1.1 or 2.0 port, Power Macintosh G3, Power Mac G4, iMac DV or iBook® computer running Mac OS 9.2.2 or higher OR Windows 98/2000/Me/XP operating system..." So the answer for the time being is no... no Linux support... but it's less than a month away... and who knows... if everyone rants on their head they may support it
Great ideas happen at 4am. Bad career moves happen at 4pm...
There's one big reason why I don't use minidisc myself. Single speed recording. I love the fact that I can make a mix CD in less time than it takes to listen to the finished product. I rip a bunch of tracks, normalize them, then burn them down to another disc, all in about half an hour. This is much different from the MD-style of 'hit play, hit record, wait'. If I could get a PC-based MD drive that allowed me to record at something faster than 1x and gave me more control over the mastering process, I'd buy one right away. I don't like MP3 players because I use Ogg and the media is expensive. But I would happily buy cheap, removable MD media. It's just that damn speed issue.
Well, I'd also like a digital out, but that's not an issue that would keep me from buying a player. I'm sure the DACs in the MD players are plenty good, and then hardware to do ATRAC->PCM and then use your receiver to do PCM->Analog.
why do americans not like/use minidisc players?
Hmm ... could it be because they suck?
Nah, it must be because we are quaint and technologically backward. It's true; I read it on /.!
Panasonic has had something like this (minus the -writer part) for over a year now. It is sweet.
Additionally, you can get porable DVD/MP3/Photo CD/Yadda Yadda players on ebay for about $70. Multiregion, too. Yes, they're not as slick as the sony, but they (and the panasonic) do include a r e m o t e c o n t r o l.
There's this little thing called 'moving parts', that lots of the mp3 enthusiasts don't likey. They don't likey, cause these 'moving parts' can make songs skip. Flash cards don't have any 'moving parts', so no skippy.
The plural of mp3 is mp3s. The plural of wma is wmas. The plural of cd is cds. The plural of DVD is DVDs. Learn English.
The Media supported lists VCD (MPEG-1) as a supported format, and then goes on to say that it lacks the ADPCM or Video Decoding Circuitry to playback CD-I disks.
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/ref=br_1_2/60 2-7461077-2529429?asin=B0000632FZ
And I gotta tell ya, I take this $99 beauty of that $300 Sony anyday. It plays CDs/CDRWs/MP3s AND DVD Video which you can hook up to a TV! No, you can't hook it up directly to a computer but who cares?
According to the article:
"When connected to a computer, the MPD-AP20U acts as a DVD-ROM drive for viewing DVD movies."
Sounds like it plays video DVD's to me...
Fujitsu P-Series, smallest notebook with an optical drive (CD-RW/DVD). 10.6"x7"x1.59". Marvelous little machine.
My first portable CD player cost $300.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Although the concept of a headless CD/DVD player is new, Asia already has CD/VCD players of similar design. I recently visited China and you could buy for around $50 a portable player that does both CD and VCD, with an video/audio out cable. The other cool feature is that it could generate both NTSC and PAL signals, and you can also use regular rechargable batteries that the unit can recharge. Sure it was a player that was made by a company that is not known here in N. America, but you would have to pay at least $200 to but anything which can do this, and then you you would probably get the PAL signal feature disabled and having to use properity rechargable batteries.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
...with _region_ code -- uhm, well, was me or them who missed a point?
I gather it doesn't have the outputs to play directly to a TV, that's a bummer too. In my quick read I thought they implied it could be used with a TV, but it wasn't that clear. Is it just a matter of the outputs, or does DVD playing require some processing in the PC that would normally be handled in a dedicated DVD player.
it offers up to four hours of CD audio playback, up to 10 hours of MP3 CD playback and up to 1.5 hours of DVD-ROM playback
Interesting that it gets more power playing an Mp3 CD than a regular CD. I would have assumed that it would take more juice to decode for mp3's.Perhaps mp3's cache to reduce disc spinning laser usage?
Also, it would be nice to get a stat on the load-time for mp3's. I've noticed that some Sony mp3-disc players in cars (such as mine) seem to prefer caching the filenames on spinup, which can take annoyingly long.
It can act as a DVD rom so if you have it connected to your PC and you can play DVDs on it. This does not make it a video DVD player. It dosn't help that the zdnet artical is confusing/wrong.
What it definatly dosn't do that the
prehaps someone should update the artical.
BTW and OT the first comment on the Sony page when I viewd it was Y'know they may have a point
It can be used as a CD-RW drive and play DVDs, but can't record DVDs?
And you can watch a whole 1.5 hours of a DVD movie on it too.
Wow.
Where do I sign?
What's with that? It makes it sort of useless as a portable player of the batteries go flat after just 1.5 hours. Since when does DVD (without mpeg-2 video decoding) need so much more battery power?
Just another product from a corporation that sues
for using their product.
Come on, this is Sony. Yes it is a leader in optical media technology, but it is also a leader in suits for that technology.
Must we insist on buying meat from a butcher with the history of e-coli?
Oh yeah, great device. Great price. Good funding for lawsuits concerning DVDs, MP3s, etc.
It's like having stove and being told not to cook.
Let's say no this time, shall we? Take our business elsewhere?
Every CD drive manufactured or distributed by Sony now has drm controls built in. Some have the drm built in and activated now, some have it built into their firmware/hardware and will be turned on through software/OS at a later date (already a news article exposing this about a month ago, don't remember where), but they all have it.
If all Sony CD decks have drm, why wouldn't the DVD decks have them?
Have you seen Sony's actions on drm legislation, broadcast flags, and the "analog hole" in Congress? Their actions in the marketplace, trying every possible technology to incorporate drm, and once again trying to install the toll booth that they tried but failed to install on the VCR?
But Sony makes great audio and video technology
Remember the story of Uncle Tom? Don't know it? Look it up.
It's a very cool device ... cool enough I went and read the article *gasp* and did a Google search on it for more details.
... it doesn't have video out itself. For all the people who want to use this combined with a thin monitor or glasses (I was hoping for this myself), forget it. You still need a laptop to decode and display video, and most laptops have a DVD option.
... now -that- is nice ... 4.7GB of music.
... especially if you have friends with Sony memory stick devices.
Point #1) It only plays DVDs when connected to a computer
Point #2) Yes, it will allow you to play MP3s from a DVD
Point #3) It will let you burn MP3s (and I assume anything else) from the memory stick to a CD. That's pretty darned handy, too
I didn't find anything about Ogg support.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I'm surprised Sony didn't use put Firewire (or iLink, as they like to call it) on this thing. It always seemed like most of their products supported it (laptops, PCs, camcorders, even the friggen PS2). But lately I haven't seen it as much. Sure, USB2 is fast, I guess. But I already have a fast Firewire port on my Sony laptop! grr.
Does USB2 already have a greater market penetration then Firewire?
Personally, I just think it would be cool if everyone switched to Ethernet. It would be kind of cool to be able to plug all your devices into a hub and have them all communicate with each other that way.
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These are no brainers and the reason I'm still using MD
1. Physical Size.
2. Media Size.
3. Battery Life.
I'm still disappointed by the battery life of these MP3 Players, sure you can carry a truckload of music around, but that's no good if you have to juice it up every couple of hours. My MD lasts for 40 hrs playback and with a handful of discs is great.
The only MP3 device that impresses me is the iPod - nice interface, flexible, big storage and as good a battery life as the rest of them.
When I was in Atlanta over the summer I went to the walkman/discman aisle at Target. I saw a cute decorative portable cd player/video cd/DVD player for $80. It doesn't have a video screen of course, but it had a headphone jack and a video output cable. It was also available in many different styles and colors. It seemed targeted to teenagers. I don't remember the brand name -- and doing a search on google didn't bring up any results. Check out the nearest Target to you and see if they have them!
This one is the size of a regular disk man. You're right if you're saying this isn't particularly innovative just somewhat convenient.
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Sony life insurance, hrm. Is that like Intel Hotels of Distinction?
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Forbes thought it was a DVD-R
Funny.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Microsoft isn't exactly a new player entering the video game space with VC funding. They've got quite a bit of outside revenue coming in. And unlike Sony, they don't have to spend almost anything on manufacturing. All they have to do is print more cds, or even just more licensing cards for business.
:P
They don't call it the "Microsoft tax" for nothing
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Very odd that most DVD players will play CDs with mp3s burnt onto them, but won't play a DVD burnt with the same mp3s. Anyone else ever think this is very strange? I wonder if this player will play mp3s burnt onto a DVD-R. That would be nice.
With a DVD player that doesn't have a screen and battery life of 1.5 hours?
...and to record on them was hell. You had to play music and hit the record button.
Yeah, sounds like a nightmare!
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I suggest you were hallucinating. There are no portable DVD players for $80. What you saw was an ordinary portable CD player.
The thing that makes MP3 support so simple is the fact there are manufacturers will have chips that can decode MP3 streams for very little cost. These chips (available from Philips, Texas Instruments, and other big-name chip manufacturers) also feature an on-chip USB controller. Functionally rich - low profile - low power usage - low implementation costs. The current array of MP3 players probably share more guts than one would think.
The system-on-a-chip design eliminates the need to bundle a more expensive embedded CPU and support a software decoder via firmware. While this is indeed a better option in the long run (due to flexibility and upgrades), it could mean the difference of $1.50 per chip versus $12.00 per CPU/flash combination. Sell 10,000 units and you can see where the savings appears. Of course, take into consideration the elimination of having to implement decoding a stream using multiple chips and interfaces, the savings are exponential. Companies are about the bottom dollar - minimum cost, maximum profit.
The fact that MP3 has been so popular over the years (the first foot in the door, so to speak), it only makes sense to cater to the 95+% of those people out there that still have collections made of solely MP3s. A smart company would take into consideration emerging technologies, but nonetheless still focus on the popular demand - the one to make the most profit.
If you visit Xiph's OGG Vorbis hardware support page you can help get the word out that you want OGG support. I can only assume that with the release of Tremor and Xiph's pledge to give free engineer to time to companies that a company would be foolish not to take advantage of free development. If you take the Slashdot Effect into consideration, eventually the emails and phone calls for OGG support in future devices will be heard, quickening the availability of such devices.
Ayup
Back in the day, ogg had a meaning as a verb in Netrek - "Let's go ogg a base". If you look at the NWfusion article, scroll down and read all of the "I won't buy it because it doesn't support Ogg" comments. Take that feedback and smoke it! They were Ogged!
It reminds me of the Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf campaign to People's Most Beautiful Person poll.
The MPD-AP20U will cost under $300 and will be available in November through retail outlets and Sony's Web site.
... that usually doubles the price of the technology. But not here - it's less than a third!
Last I checked, to get all the functions of this device seperately you'd be spending over $1,000. Then when you pack it all into one small case and make it portable
$300 is a DARN fine buy, if you ask me. Though, I don't need one of these because I have hardware to do all the functions independantly, and no need to be portable about it. But it would make a cool Christmas present for a geek relative.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies
That's the second half of the 5th paragraph in the artical.
Come on people. It's not that hard. (and +5 informative? Whatever)
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The constant linear velocities (CLV) of CDs and DVDs are different - very different. DVD discs in themselves are also designed differently. DVDs can be configured as follows (taking account only one side of the disc): single layer or dual layer.
The normal 1X speed CLV CD-ROM spins a CD at about 495rpm.
The normal 1X speed CLV DVD-ROM spins a single layer DVD at about 550rpm to 700rpm. A dual layer DVD is spun at 1100rpm to 1400rpm - effectively double.
So even at the very basic speeds of CDs and DVDs, DVDs require more power simply by having to spin the disc a bit faster than a CD.
Ayup
Is this thing bus powered/bus rechargeable, or does it require the use of a wall wart?
Here is an excerpt from MacNN (Mac News Network) talking about the benefits of USB 2.0 over FireWire -
The full article can be read here. Apple's retraction of the $1 per port licensing fee came a bit late in the game, evidenced largely but the overwhelming backing of USB 1.x in portable devices versus the limited selection of FireWire devices.
Ayup
...I suppose today is "ooh! Sony's cool!" day.
TOMORROW must be "Sony is an evil member of the RIAA and the MPAA" day.
Silly me, I thought Sony was a member of the RIAA and the MPAA, with all that implies, 24 x 7 x 365...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Actually, you're the one who needs to read the fucking article.
When connected to a Windows or Macintosh computer, the device can serve as a CD-RW drive for recording digital content or backing up computer data. When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies
But thanks for insulting everyone who Can read, you illiterate moron.
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First off, The thing is NOT that cool. Now, I might go out and buy a MP3/CD/DVD audio player for my car, with some sort of cool face plate, but this is excessively silly.
secondly:
the plural of mp3 is mp3s, if the mp3 owned something then that object would be the mp3's. same with CDs, DVDs, and the general pronoun it.
Geez people. I can't believe I'm the first person to notice this.
hmmmm?
I bought a deck and portable player about 5 years ago, before MP3 got any real traction. I loved it at the time and still use it occasionally.
My guess is that it didn't really take off because about the time it started getting market traction (reasonable prices, Best Buy-type availability) MP3 began to really take off and stole its momentum.
My biggest wish was that Sony had embraced MP3 more openly. The portable MD players and media would be an awesome combination for playing MP3s -- a couple of hours of 128k MP3s per disc, and far far cheaper than flash memory, as well as more portable to other devices (car, etc) which things like the iPod can't do because they have fixed storage.
All they would have had to do was issue a portable and/or home deck recorder with a USB port and some basic software for transfering MP3 files directly to the media.
There was a great April fools mockup of a Palm/MD player that could play MP3s as well, it would have been dynamite.
Back under your bridge, troll.
Koss CDVD Player by Koss
I returned three (count them, three) different Sony walkman MP3 players because they all had TERRIBLE skipping problems when playing MP3s. Also during this ordeal, the store's display model Sony boom box had an entirely different set of problems where it would start ignoring some (about 50%) of the MP3s on a disc.
The end result is that I ended up buying a Philips MP3 walkman that I've yet to experience any sort of problem with.
Sure, Sony has very beautiful products, but they tend to IGNORE THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THESE PRODUCTS in favor of style.
I wouldn't trust them with any cutting-edge media device, period.
forget VCD, can it do playstation?
:)
Find a way for me to hook up a controller and have it run playstation games, and i am so buying this
I mean we're talking about a factor of 3 here. Really, the DVD/CD mechanism shouldn't need much power. This is a $300 device, so they can easily put in a large (say 32 MB) ram buffer, which will hold 1/2 hour of music at MP3 bit rates. So twice an hour they can spin up the disk, transfer 32MB of music in a few seconds, and spin the disk back down. That shouldn't use much total power at all. Where is the power going really?
it just doesnt play it can record also!
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Next please!
Too pricey for something that doesn't play Ogg, doesn't have Firewire connector.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
If the artical is wrong, chastizing people who belive it for not reading it dosn't really make that much sense.
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I'm pretty sure Sony didn't have to pay, or something like that, given their involvement in the development of firewire.
Besides, this thing costs more then a PS2, and that has firewire...
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The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an
"airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers
while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference --
one can see only a very few things at once.
-- Fred Brooks
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