ZVUE's $99 Video and MP3 Player

blackmonday writes "Hand Held Entertainment's ZVUE is an MP3 player, video and photo viewer with a color screen. At the price of $99, I think it might be worth the investment for the hacking potential alone. Uses Secure Digital/MMC cards rather than Compact Flash, but looks very cool. The funniest part - you can buy cartridges (apparently in some propietary format) of low budget wrestling movies and wannabe rapper videos."

Comments

zvue announced DivX and MP4 compatibility

[i4u]

Zvue supports DivX video standard

Re:zvue announced DivX and MP4 compatibility

[Kenja]

If by "standard" you mean "pay us another 70$ and we'll let you view DiVX files" then yes, its standard.

Re:zvue announced DivX and MP4 compatibility

[jbezdek]

That's a "informative" post? Hmm. Let me give a try at some real information.

In reality, we subjected the ZVue player to our full battery of DivX Certified tests. There are several dozen test cases that use a large sample of representative DivX video content downloaded from the Internet. We make sure that every DivX Certified device meets minimum standards of quality (e.g., no freezes on high motion scenes, good ff and rew performance, and of course high-visual-quality DivX video playback) before we allow the product to be marketed using the DivX name. A typical product goes through several rounds of testing (with major and minor tweaks to hardware, firmware, etc. along the way) before it passes all the tests. :bez

Re:Too much hype...

[ardiri]

> Uses Secure Digital/MMC cards rather than Compact Flash, but looks very cool
Yet another memory card format to contend with, ugh.

va? SD/MMC have been out for a LONG time - its not news that they are being used within handhelds or portable equipment. they have been in use in both palm and pocket pc devices for well over two years now - not to mention that there are many cameras, mp3 players that use this format as well. if your going to bitch about a new format, try bitching about XD :)

Wannabe - not quite

[WhiteLudaFan]

For what it is worth, Lil' Jon is a platinum selling rap artist. He currently is involved with 2 songs in the top 20 of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart and 3 songs in the top 50 of the Hot 100.

Not so good

[pcmanjon]

I've reviewed one of these directly from Hand Held Entertainment and it's not all it's cracked up to be, the design doesn't fit in your pocket (tested in bluejeans) very well and it only supports mp3 (not ogg)

Additionally, they sent some of the proprietary cartridges to try out, 2 out of the 3 freebie proprietary cartridges we tested did not work.

I wouldn't pay cash for it.

Regards

Look here

[AtariAmarok]

Look here. It is not the same site as the slashdotted one, but at least you can see what it looks like.

PCMag Review link - also, it plays DivX

[blorg]

Can be found here with picture of the thing here. Apparently it plays DivX too.

Compgeeks has them for $144.50. CF == minidrive

[Linuxathome]

Compgeeks has them for $144.50; you can check the site for the specs. It has MP4 capability, which is nice for you Xvid fans. For those of you who don't understand why we're griping that it has no CF slot, perhaps you'll understand better after I tell you that people have been getting cheap 4GB minidrive CF cards by cracking open devices such as the Creative Lab's Muvo2 MP3 player -- i.e. the higher capacity drives/memory cards so far, tend to be CF cards. It's still up in the air whether or not the 4GB minidrive from the Apple iPod can be used in devices that support CF Type II cards.