Slashdot Mirror
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."
Cool! I am still fiddling with the I-Opener from several years ago. Now something else to splice into the Jeep :)
Maybe I could use it for the OBD-II display?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
After 2 years of tryin,
I' think I must be dyin,
Today sure hits the spot
cuz I got my first article posted on slashdot!
Can I get a hell yeah?
Yet another memory card format to contend with, ugh.
Pretty hyped site. Little on useful information. :-/
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It'd be sweet to wire one of these into the front of a casing & set it up as a secondary monitor for performance data.
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
I bet it could be used as a pretty neat MP3 and video player too!
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Just wait till you get buy low budget porn cards. Then things will really take off.
Seriously, I just don't get why you'd want to watch video's at a resolution so small.
... It sounds like the videos are going to shit on you..
Hot new music videos, extreme radical sports, wild, action videos that wreak havoc and lay waste
Who the hell uses the word "radical" anymore? WTF are "wild, action video that wreak havoc and lay waste"
Ugh.. just lame...
--D3X
NeoX3.com: The One Site for Free Adult Entertainment...
...are more durable than their servers!
Five comments, and already slashdotted. Sigh.
=)
Zvue supports DivX video standard
Now I'm really going to have to wait for a bathroom stall to open up.. portable pr0n.. just what we all needed...
---
How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.
Are they using this gadget to power their site?
Sounds interesting, but appears slashdotted already. In the mean time, does anyone know of a similar device which is Cd-based?
.jpg/etc and text files from the CD (and of course play audio and MP3).
Imagine one of those little round MP3-CD players, except it has a small color screen instead of 2 line LCD-readout, and it property display video files,
Does such exist? Am I the only one who would be interested in it?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
a hacking potential, and as for memory formats, who really cares? I have an xD card camera, and the card I have in it is going to stay in it (512MB) and the one that came with it, a 32MB card, is really too small to do anything with. My camera is also not going anywhere, and if it breaks, I'll get another one or one from the same line, as the features are what I want (shameless plug for Olympus Z-50). Granted, I'd prefer a less expensive format such as CF, but if it turns out to be something I like, the memory used for this one would probably also be restricted to just this one device.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
No specs at all that I can find but at the bottom of their FAQ is this:
Why does the low battery indicator come on after I put in fresh batteries and use them for only a short time?
Depending on the type and brand of battery, the low battery indicator may come on while there are still hours of battery life left. You can continue to use the ZVUE until the batteries actually run down. You should also be aware, that when the batteries are low, the ZVUE may not operate properly.
huh?
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.
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. It is not the same site as the slashdotted one, but at least you can see what it looks like.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Add a TV tuner via USB or whatever, and it would be pretty nice for ice fishing. Especially if it had the capacity to "mini-Tivo" a few favorite shows which you could watch whenever you wanted. Ice fishing is fun, but two days of staring at nothing but your radar and your trap flags would be a nice thing to break up with an episode of Alias or something.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
$99 for a a nice gadget. Seeing videos in this small screen is awlful, but it looks great to show the digital photos of your last trip for your friends while drinking a beer without computers around. It should be cheaper to have just a photo display device. This is usually a good use of color PDAs, but they are expensive. Does anyone here know about a cheap, good, and linux compatible device just to display photos? An internal HD would be better than a compact flash one.
As opposed to the high budget wrestling movies like "No Holds Barred" and ...,ummm, "All The Marbles" and ...umm, ...films like that.
See here
In soviet Canada, Zed-View pronounces YOU!
do not read this line twice.
Cybiko is a low-cost, hackable handheld computer released at the end of 2000. Forum leaders may soon expand the boards to officially cover the ZVUE - it's a logical step from the Cybiko computer.
Feel free to discuss the ZVUE in the Development boards.
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
---
Please try the following:
If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
Open the www.zvue.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
Click the Back button to try another link.
Click Search to look for information on the Internet.
HTTP 400 - Bad Request
Internet Explorer
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
I'd rather have a bigger screen at the cost of some color and video quality.
Hmm.... Looks like I've found a buyer for my 5 year old 10" black and white TV. In fact, I'll sell it to you for the same price as this gadget, just 100 bucks.
Since the main website is slashdotted, heres what it says on the home-page (not much for those of you expecting specs)
``You can be first to get a new ZVUE!
The new ZVUE is here now! And it really plays full motion, color video right in the palm of your hand! Order the new ZVUE! and you'll be watching the coolest new music videos, extreme sports and outrageous action entertainment--while you're on the go, anytime, anyplace!
> Order your ZVUE now!
For just $99.00 you can be the first to own a ZVUE--the hottest new video product in years! With your cool new ZVUE you can view full-color, high-quality video right in the palm of your hand.
Watch our exciting, new ZCARD! videos: Hot new music videos, extreme radical sports, wild, action videos that wreak havoc and lay waste--playing now on the ZVUE Player!"
If it uses Secure Media for storage of said "mp3s and pictures", it's unlikely you'll be able to hack it unless you can crack the content keys, or provide your own "secured" media.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
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?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Can be found here with picture of the thing here. Apparently it plays DivX too.
Hasbro has a device called the VideoNow
. It's only $50, but the screen is black and white. It uses mini CD's, but from what I understand from a friend who tried to hack it, the CD-Now's have the boot data written on the inside of the CD further in from where normal burners write.I have blog like everyone else
Doesnt suck power. It is hard to run a flashlight for 6-8 hours and the backlight is just as bright as one- so it uses an expensive LED backlight.
Specs are 200 MHZ ARM9 with 160x234 screen at 24 bit color. The screen uses fast fluid for video unlike most PDA screens.
It probably runs linux already.
Pretty easy to re-encode videos to the DIVX Handheld or portable profile if they aren't already using VirtualDub and the free version of DIVX.
Here is a PDF with more detail.
ZVue Specs
It looks a little cheap to me, but for $99 I guess you can't get burned too bad.
...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?)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
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.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
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.
Linux at home
When 3.5" floppies were introduced to South Africa, in order to distinguish them from the flexible and floppy 5.25" disks, they were called "stiffies" ... so the campaign was 'would you rather have a 5.25" floppy or a 3.5" stiffy".
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."