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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.
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)
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?
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Bite Me Fanboy!!
Drat... beat me to the obligatory "but does it play [enter open source format of choice here]?" quote.
What I want to know though is, does it play DivX files? That would be pretty neat if it did.
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?
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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!
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!
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.
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
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).
Try not to think of it in those terms... think of it as the formula below:
Hey does it run [ Insert open source alternative that may not be as good as a pay product but automaticially cool because I know of the program and I sound intelligent. ] ??
Just wondering I just got a new [ Insert cool ass piece of hardware that just came out 2 weeks ago and want to post about it because I think by bragging about cool hardware I will automaticially get mod points. ] and I wanna try it out.
> and it can play from DVDs [...] more than 20Gb in ONE SINGLE MEDIA
Yeah, but that would be only pre-recorded data DVDs. If you burn your own DVD-Rs, you're back to 4.7GB worth of MP3 tracks.
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. "
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.
For a portable device which records and reads CDs at 24X, rewrites CDs at 10X and reads DVDs at 8X, for less than $300 I think it isn't too bad actually. IMHO of course.
Will it play ogg files? My absolute requirement for anything I get like this is that it be able to play oggs.
Also, does it use the USB storage interface, or some other standard USB interface so I don't need funky drivers to use it under Linux?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This alone is a showstopper for me. Of course people will hack around and maybe get it to work. The price doesn't seem too high if it is under US$ 300 as the article mentions though.
Not really.
Ogg Vorbis has better audio quality than MP3. Someone who just wants better quality would say the same thing.
Furthermore, supporting *wma* (also rarely used and lower quality than vorbis) costs money and doesn't have a lot of point.
May we never see th
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!
Because MiniDisc sucks ass.
Seriously, why buy into a proprietary format which none of your friends have a player for, has almost no pre-recorded music, and doesn't sound very good (sorry, ATRAC compression is as bad as MP3 to my ears)? CD-R(w) is cheaper, can be played almost anywhere, and can even be used for things other than music. With CD-R, you can choose between uncompressed audio, mild compression that holds much more than MD and sounds better, or higher compression where you can put ten albums on a single disc (and still not sound much worse than MD).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I would consider it more "Informative" than "Insitghtful" but, that's just me..
The reason so many people ask about Ogg Vorbis is because they are actually interested in supporting the format..
If there were some feature missing from a product that you were interested in, don't you think that posting a message about it in a public forum would be a good way to raise awareness of that feature?... Also note that when you follow a link to the story, there is a section there for posting comments too.. And the first comment that you see, is "Does it support ogg?"... Probably a slashdotter that followed the link, but still.. People are trying to get the word out, not troll..
Personally, I agree with the poster, and many other posters, in saying that I won't be buying a player until someone comes out with one that supports Ogg... It's simply a better format...
In comparison, I think that buying a device without Ogg support would be like buying a really fancy cassette player.. Just like CDs sound better than casettes, Oggs sound better than MP3s.. I'm not just making that statement based on what I've read elsewhere.. I have actually taken several songs and encoded them both ways, at various bitrates to compare for myself..
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 /.!
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?
Fujitsu P-Series, smallest notebook with an optical drive (CD-RW/DVD). 10.6"x7"x1.59". Marvelous little machine.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Forbes thought it was a DVD-R
Funny.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
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.
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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Is this thing bus powered/bus rechargeable, or does it require the use of a wall wart?
...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.
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.
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?
Too pricey for something that doesn't play Ogg, doesn't have Firewire connector.
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