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

Too much hype...

[ackthpt]

Lessee, three links on the same page to "Order Your ZVUE Now!" ... Link to the Player, more "Order Your ZVUE Now!" links, (I see it arrives for the 2003 holiday shopping season, looks like old news.) The FAQ covers some stuff. This thing probably sucks power when watching video, so "runs for hours on 4 AA batteries" probably means audio, not video. It's probably pretty heavy, too, but I couldn't find weight or whether it has a belt clip.

Uses Secure Digital/MMC cards rather than Compact Flash, but looks very cool.

Yet another memory card format to contend with, ugh.

Pretty hyped site. Little on useful information. :-/

Re:Too much hype...

[harrkev]

CF and SD cards serve two different (but overlapping) markets.

SD is great when the card has to be as small as possible. Some devices that use SD would have to be quite a bit larger in order to use CF instead.

CF is "memory for the masses." If space is not the issue, then CF fits the bill. Because it is larger, you can fit a microdrive in the case. And if you want solid state, the case will hold a larger die and/or multiple dies in one package for storage galore.

If both SD and CF were almost the same size, I could see the reason for your gripe. But one is smaller/expensive and the other is larger/versatile/cheaper.

Re:Too much hype...

[ichthus]

CompactFlash should have won this battle by now, dammit!

It's not a battle, really. It's a question of the device. Sure, it would be nice to have a single [cross-platform] standard that everyone can play with. But, a CF card would almost double the size of my MP3 player (MPIO FL100). In the case of small devices (no innuendos, pls.) the US postage stamp-sized SD is the way to go.

Re:Why not?

[p4ul13]

hacking potential alone

He didn't say it was hackable, just that the chances were good.

Potential adj.
1. Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent: a potential problem.
2. Having possibility, capability, or power.
3. Grammar. Of, relating to, or being a verbal construction with auxiliaries such as may or can; for example, it may be hackable.

Re:But I've already got CF

[Kenja]

And I allready have SD/SDIO cards for my PDA. Whats your point? SD/SDIO is smaller and faster then CF. This is why its getting used more and more over CF. Should we be bitching that this thing isn't supporting six inch floppy disks as well?

The IMPORTANT question is:

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

...how long will it take for someone to reverse-engineer the format so that we can make our own SD/MMC cards with our own video (space-shifted from our legally-purchased DVD's [yes, I'm serious...] or 'home video'.)?

That is the specific feature that'd make it useful to me. I have no need of a special proprietary-format-only player where the low-quality proprietary video cards cost as much as full DVD's, especially when portable DVD players seem to be obtainable these days for only $50-$100 more than this player is selling for.

(Hmmm...what's the capacity of the SD cards with the proprietary movies on them? Can they be erased and used as normal SD cards for other applications?)

Re:Six inch floppies?

[Chasuk]

Either a masterstroke in obscure references or you made it up. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Don't be so kind. There have never been "six inch floppy disks" - though there have been three inch floppy disks.

However, consider that we still have people referring to 3.5" floppy disks as hard disks, to their monitor as their computer, and the actual tower case just as "that thing that you plug the printer into" and I'm not surprised.