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Creative Labs to Release Video Jukebox Portable
An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of the Archos line of digital video portables, Creative has announced they will release the Zen Portable Media Player this fall. Like the Archos the unit will sport a 20GB hard drive, 3.8" screen and will be able to record your favorite TV shows on the fly."
The Specs weren't really mentioned. 20GB, but is it USB 2.0 or Firewire (400 or 800)?
Windows XP only, yawn, with full DRM. Not my type then.
3.8" TFT Color LCD- I used to watch portable TVs this size in the 1990's. This isn't appealing to me personally, I don't want to see a tiny Fight Club, with me straining to watch under the few pixels.
Record ability? What kind of input? Composite, S-Video, Component?
All I really like is the record ability, and then able to watch them on a bigger screen, like allow playback on a TV.
ok i was at the creative hq in singapore awhile 2 days back, and the staff there told me that the 20GB version of the zen will be retailing for around SGD$800, to be released sometime in july.
;)
it's got a really slick interface, and it's really light, if you guys wanna know
I remember back when Microsoft touted that these media players running Windows would be the death of the iPod, but it seems less and less likely now. The only people who could possibly use this device as a music player primarily must have deep pockets (in both the physical and metaphorical sense).
I don't think these will be a death-of-the-iPod type machine, more a solid market of their own. Smaller, but no less worth following for a company that's capable of making the things.
A bit like the success of Apple when viewed from a distance. They may have under 5% of 'the market' but that is a damned gigantic market.
Actually I own the Archos av380 and I have to say it is supremely usefu little thing. I travel a lot and being able o cart about 80 gigs worth of movies and mp3s is VERY useful.
The battery life is about 4 hours playing movies, longer playing mp3s because no screen use. I travel a lot round europe where travel times aren't usually longer than the 4 or so hours.
Compression is good.
If you compress using something like XviD, you can easily get 1 1/2 hours of high(ish) quality video on a CD - which is 700MB. So in 20GB you could get about 42 hours of video. Which seems adequate to me, unless you really need to take it to some desert island for a month. Then of course, its on a smaller screen, so you could have even more compression.
I had the opportunity to beta-review the Creative Zen PMC at Microsoft a few weeks ago, and was fairly impressed with the Creative Zen. Video playback was exceptional for a QVGA screen, Audio playback (mp3 or WMA) was very clean and crisp - in fact, 128-bit mp3's sounded as good on playback as 192-bit or better...and I have very good ears (not Golden, but close). It was fairly lightweight, although heavier that an iPod but had similar weight to any other kind of device. Connection options were to an included USB dock, and USB 1.1 and 2.0 are supported - with USB 2.0 the preferred interface & speed (naturally). We did the usual "shake it" test to check for playback stability during Video and Audio playback and didn't detect any skips or HD resynch problems. An extra feature was the ability to upload image files (jpeg) and be able to do a slideshow. This device might work well for portable presentations, but I can't remember if there is a video-out jack.
.vs Blue" "PDC" episode - where a sweat-drenched Steve Balmer shouted & chanted the word "Developers" over and over and over to the crowd at the 2003 PDC to the point of exhaustion. We had a good laugh at their reaction, which was pretty funny in and of itself.
Battery usage didn't seem to be much of a problem, since the number of renderable bits you're pulling off of the drive to the device's FlashROM or RAM are only needed to render at QVGA size.
The Zen does a very nice auto-synch with pre-defined folders using WMP 10 (yes, we got to preview & play with that as well) - however, the synch of pre-recored media is only PC-to-Device and not Device-to-PC. We didn't get to check-out the TV Recording feature, so I'm not sure if that would be an exception to the unidirectional synching functions.
When I was there the total head-count of non-MS people at this preview was maybe 20. They had people in and out all day with a variety of hardware to test their device with (the prerequsite for attending was to bring your own personal system to the Event to test it against non-HCL, real-world systems and your average user) A fairly decent cross-section of users appeared to be there, with most of them bringing laptops - I elected to bring my desktop system along with me on the 2+ hour drive to Redmond.
The most humorous part was my loading-up on to the Zen of the "Red
Unfortunately, the "Thank You" gift wasn't the usual fair ("pick a Microsoft software title on this table"), but we were given a nice pair of Sennheizer PX-100 headphones and free munchies for the afternoon.
All in all, an excellent device.
--ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
At least there are Linux tools for almost any portable (digital) audio players available. Starting with tools for the Sony Diskman, which fas famous years ago, to portable jukeboxes from Apple (iPod), Creative (Nomad), Archos (JukeBox), Diamond (Rio) and other players as well as Linux PDAs from our days.
I bought I Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 60GB from an online retailer and it has been nothing but a nightmare. The player lasted six days before dying of a sudden hardware failure.
The online vendor lost half the items that came with the player and blew off my return of the defective merchandise. Two months later, I am still arguing with them to get it replaced.
Creative's warranty is worthless even after jumping through all their hoops as the RMI is perpetually lost in the mail. I have contacted them over a half a dozen times. Each time a new RMI was promised, each time lost in the mail. They now claim it is beyond the return period despite all of the email chains.
I will never buy another Creative product again.
And THAT will be the problem with these video players.
Whaddya mean "will be"? These things exist now. No need for speculation! Let's check out the reviews and see how many hours of battery life these video players actually have (when playing video, that is):
RCA Lyra RD2780: 4 hours max
Archos AV320: about 3 hours
Archos AV340: 3.5 hours
So no, you won't get your 5 hours from any f the current players.
I think the real problem here is that the manufacturers are trying to make these players too similar to audio-only players (e.g. the iPod). They're trying to use the same wimpy 800-1000mAh custom battery packs that most mp3 jukeboxes use. This makes sense from a business standpoint -- you only have to make one battery for your various jukebox products, and you get to sell those custom replacement batteries for $50. But from a practical standpoint, this just won't do.
The solution: video players are bound to be larger than mp3 players anyway, if only because of the screen size, and they're all an inch or more thick. It's time to start making these things use standard batteries, just like digital cameras. They'll fit, and the capacity of regular batteries is plenty high. I've seen AA batteries advertised with as much as 2300mAh of capacity. One of those would do the trick for sure, and two would rock! Even two AAA batteries with a 800mAh capacity each would be an improvement.
I wish Replay would make one of these portables to leverage their PVRs. It is a logical extension. Simply put the portable on the network and download the programs you already regularly record on your PVR.
You can already do this. Copy the files from the RTV with DVArchive. Process through ReVUE. Transcode down to Archos format. Copy over to the Archos. Here's someone who does RTV->Archos regularly.
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