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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."
Does anyone else think it looks like a Sega Game Gear? Think it munches through batteries even faster with a HD inside? What was it, 3 hours of gameplay on like six batteries?
Why the hell would anyone want to buy a product that records in DRM crap format?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Given:
a) The spectacular lack of success of mini-tv's.
b) The existence of portable DVD players and DVD-R's.
c) You can't watch it while driving, working, running or 9/10th's of the locations you can listen to music on an mp3 player.
d) Size/weight/cost of comparable mp3-only players.
This just smacks of a "gadget for gadget's sake" mentality, and is a marketing disaster waiting to happen, IMO.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I think that the niche market Creative is aiming for here is PVR, except the feautre here is that its portable, and capable of showing video without being connected to a seperate display. That, in itself, is probably a poor choice considering that the price far exceeds that of TiVo, etc.
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 really don't understand this trend toward portable video players. I think the only rational explanation is clueless execs who see the profitability of portable audio players and want to jump on the bandwagon.
Audio is portable, video isn't. You can listen to a song while you bike, while you jog, while you're at work, while you're driving. You cannot (or should not) watch TV during any of these activities (save perhaps jogging on a treadmill - although a treadmill isn't exactly portable either).
Furthermore, no one craves the ultimate small-screen experience. With video, bigger is better.
Finally, I can load up my iPod with my favorite songs, and listen to them all day. I cannot do this with video; most people have no problem listening to the same song a few times a week, or even a few times a day. Few people watch the same TV episode more than once a year.
Now, if you had a media player that had all the featuers of your competitor's music player, at the same price as that music player, I'd buy your media player, 'cause hey, you never know when you'll need to watch T'Pol getting busy in that decontamination chamber, but sicne the manufacturing cost of the video player is so much higher, this is extremely unlikely.
And THAT will be the problem with these video players. They will either have to have a TON of memory so they can do what an iPod does, or will have to spin the HD up/down alot or just keep it running; which will suck battery life.
I'm not sure how usefull one of these things would be, but I would want a MINIMUM of 5 hours of video playback, and I doubt these devices will be able to achieve that (at least reliably).
I'm worried about battery life and you should be too.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
less likely, because Mr. Jobs has already said people don't want to watch videos on their 3" screen. reading some of the comments here, he may well be right on the money.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Realistically - and this is said with no disrespect at all for the OSS community, to whom all computer users have some gratitude owed - if you make computing decisions based on philosophical constraints, you are not in the target market
Kudos to Rio for making a player you are happy with, but in general these companies are going to go for money and widespread adoption, and that probably means embracing the proprietary codecs. A Video player may not have the power and space to spare of an mp3 device, slimness of code will probably be a priority bearing in mind the bandwidth needed for real-time video display.
An iPod copies a track into RAM in its entirety, then plays it with the hard drive powereed down. This video player will have to stream off a disk and render in real time, that has to be a more intensive task.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
When will some engineer at one of these companys get a brain and put a 20gb drive in a Pocket PC!? Then we'd have the ideal MP3, Video machine that is infinitely more useful and at a comparable price.
I think the only way any company can make a successful HDD-based portable movie player is not to have a miniature screen, but to couple it with not-too-expensive video-goggles.
IMO, portable video players with a small integrated screen are the same as a MP3 player with a speaker on the front. Stupid.
All MP3 players come with earphones, dont they? Why dont all video-players come with video-goggles?
1. The player's screen probably won't be the same resolution as your video, so you'll be able to save space this way.
2. Since the screen is so small, doing a Divx-style codec on it isn't going to hurt the detail level, so you save a ton of space there.
I can easily fit a two hour movie divxed, in full res (720x480, minus the black bars) on 2 cds (1.4GB), with little loss in perceived quality.
Of course, if you need something to shuffle films around, you probably do need something that will store it, but not necessarily play it.
Karnal
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. For people who comute by bus or train or fly a lot it would be great.
I'm hard pressed to see the point with such tool, even as a total gadget-freak myself. People who have the money to spend on portable video player most likely have the cash -- or the luxury of employer buying all the gizmos -- to buy other similar stuff already and I'm fairly certain most people who would fit as suitable buyers for this tool already have a 400MHz+ PDA with full DivX/XviD decoding capabilities (iPaq 4150 for example can play 1000kbps+ DivX5 clips without problems) bundled with something (PDA) that most people find much more useful in their daily lives other than plain portable video player.
I agree that the storage space is something you need to think about, but 1GB SD cards (I mentioned, people who are most likely to buy the portable video device, are -- in my eyes anyway -- people who have the money to buy other neat technical stuff as well) are getting cheaper and you can carry several SD cards in your PDA wallet anyway.
Also, PDA (specifically PocketPC with PocketMVP -- don't have much experience with current PalmOS or Linux models) plays nicely most popular a/v formats, so the a/v files you have on desktop PC can be simply copied to flash cards to take with you (to keep you entertained while in boring meetings/seminars or in transatlantic flight).