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."

Comments

What the article fails to mention...

[Johnny Fusion]

The use of the name "Zen" is intentional. The short battery life, will lead to a blank screen partway through your latest pirated movie, leaving you to only contemplate the emptiness of it all.

Re:What the article fails to mention...

[XorNand]

I dunno about you but I'm guessing that the vast majority of purchasers will only be using this two minutes at a time. It is made for one-handed operation, right?

Specs

[mr100percent]

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.

Game gear?

[mr100percent]

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?

The 90's called! They want their DAT back!

[Alsee]

Why the hell would anyone want to buy a product that records in DRM crap format?

-

Favorite?

[Anonymous Coward]

But can it also record shows I don't like?

I wonder...

[Sven-Erik]

how soon after it is released that someone has Linux running on it?

Re:I wonder...

[TheGavster]

And then how long after that before it becomes a felony to run Linux on your Zen, for fear that you might watch a TV show a second time!

it's really cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;)

Video iPod?

[Midnight Thunder]

Now that Archos, Sony and Creative labs have release video 'personal media players', will that mean that Apple will follow next with a video iPod?

Re:Video iPod?

[Raleel]

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.

Can someone please tell me why these are needed?

[Hawthorne01]

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.

Why not a full fledged notebook?

[gotr00t]

Considering the price, size, and battery life, I don't see why someone should get this and not a full laptop, because its obvious that there is no advantage to buying what amounts to essentially a DRM-crppled mobile device capable of playing movies. Some more recent laptops have battery lives of up to 5 hours when doing things like listening to music and such.

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).

Re:Why not a full fledged notebook?

[Amiga Lover]

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.

Re:Why not a full fledged notebook?

[linzeal]

For one, as a habitual laptop user in public places it begets thievery, as the Slashdot Article yesterday attests to. Smaller items are easier to use and pay attention to the people around you. It is very difficult to sit with a laptop with a 15" screen and stay aware of your situation.

My sister, who hates most technology is raving about the RCA lyra unit but describes it in very untechnical terms like sophisticated naming (IDv32 tags), compact music (mp3pro), and other such layman's views on mp3 devices. I overheard a conversation at a bar recently that went like this;

Man 1: I need to get me an mp3 player for my job, all my cds keep getting scratched up.
Woman: My sister has one of them, a 1000 song holder. Apple makes it, like you know those educational pcs so you know it will be good.
Man 2: You need to get one that can hold 10,000 songs or you are going to get bored listening to the same 1000 songs.
Man 1: 10,000 songs? My computer can't hold that many, how would I get them on my mp3 player?
Woman: You can use them like memory, just plug them in the printer port.

Etcetera ad nauseum.

Printer port I'm assuming she is talking about USB or he better have patience as one of his virtues.

Too bad it's a niche product with a small market

[Digital_Quartz]

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.

iPod

[N3koFever]

Sounds impressive (although I'd prefer an iRiver one because it's driverless so it works on anything that supports USB 2.0 and will have no DRM), but no matter how impressive other companies make their jukeboxes and media players the masses will continue to suck up iPods like there's no tomorrow.

"I know it's expensive with less functionality, shorter batter life, lower sound quality, and forces me to use bloated software, but it's so pretty!"

Battery Life

[MBCook]

Maybe it should be called the "Achilies", because battery life will be the thing's Achilies heel. iPods and other players only get 8 hours of battery life because they spin up the HD, load 64 megs of songs (about an hour), and spin down. The rest of the time they use about the same ammount of power as a flash player because they are getting songs from memory. If you constantly fast forward causing frequent disk access, the battery life plummets.

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.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Battery Life

[Some Dumbass...]

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.

As someone who owns several portable MP3 players

[Powercntrl]

I think they're overestimating the demand for a portable video player. The appeal of a portable MP3 player is the ability to listen to what is in essence, a commercial-free radio station you control, while you're doing some other activity. I don't see too many people interested in trying to watch a movie while exercising, mowing the lawn, working, etc.

Generally, a movie is something you sit down for, relax and enjoy. If you're just going to be watching a movie, you may as well do it where the movie watching experience is better. Chances are, if you have the money to blow for a portable video player, you've got a relatively decent A/V setup back at home.

Now on the topic of having content for this video player, who really has a lot of (or any for that matter) Windows Media Video files? I know I certainly don't have any worthy of buying a portable player to watch. I'm sure most people's format of choice for a home movie collection is DVD. Unlike converting audio CDs to MP3s for a portable player, converting DVDs is a very slow and legally questionable (due to having to circumvent the CSS encryption) process. For anyone that wants to watch movies portably, an inexpensive portable DVD player has a lot more usability appeal.

While I'm sure eventually buying movies online will be a big deal, right now it offers none of the benfits of online purchasing. Puchasing music online allows you to buy just the tracks you want, purchasing a movie online screws you out of higher quality and a physical disc you can resell if you so desire.

Killer feature

[capz loc]

I would love to have the ability to capture digital video to this thing from a firewire-equipped camcorder. A feature like this could even be used to record video directly to hard drive instead of to those lovable miniDV tapes.

Call me when it supports Ogg

[NM156]

This would be interesting to me if it supported Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. I just bought the fantastic Rio Karma digital music player, and I chose it over the other offerings, specifically because it supports Ogg Vorbis. I'm in the process of encoding my entire CD collection in this format, for both quality and philosophical reasons.
Besides the Rio, there are two other HD based players that support Ogg/Vorbis, the iRiver H120 and the Neuros but I went with the Karma mostly because it's the smallest of the three, the price was right, and the sound is excellent.

Re:Call me when it supports Ogg

[CdBee]

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.

HD in Pocket PC's

[GarthSweet]

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.

small screens rant

[WormholeFiend]

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?

Excuse me? 20 gb?

[Nomihn0]

Since when is that adequate for video storage? I recently filmed a ten minute digital video at a reasonable resolution and it weighed in at 2.2 gb. This is the sort of media I'd be transporting and watching with this device. Now, am I supposed to accept that 2 hours of high-fidelity recordings would crap out my Archos device? I think there's a reason that the video-editing workstations of the desktop world have 250 gb drives (and, if you are serious enough to get something similar to this archos, you'd likely use 2x250 gb drives).

Video on the go... no thanks.

[mac os ken]

How obsessed do you have to be with your media of choice to plunk down a couple of hundred dollars for a heavy piece of hardware to watch on your commute? How much will new batteries cost? Given the cost, I might as well own a laptop which currently is the best all-in-one device.

I do not want a toaster that can play MP3s, I want it to make toast.

Re:Excuse me? 20 gb?

[karnal]

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.

Re:Excuse me? 20 gb?

[Shmooze]

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.

It'll fail for another reason...

[Aphrika]

The reason isn't Windows Media, battery life, drive space or unit size, it's something much more simple.

Sunlight.

I don't particularly think that screen technology is up to the standard required to watch a 3-4" TV screen outside on a bright, sunny day. Sure, transflective goes some way towards solving the problem, and might be tolerable on a PDA, but on a $400 device that's being sold as a viewer? If you're envisaging using this while sat on the bus, in the park or outside Starbucks think again - you aren't going to be able to see the screen very well if they're using current technology.

Tivo and Replay should make these

[Beebos]

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.

DRM...

[Anubis350]

the player uses Microsoft's implementation of MPEG-4. As of this writing, the player only operates with Windows XP (which has Microsoft's full DRM capabilities), a sign of capitulation to the movie industry that wishes to put locks on how users view digital movies.

However:

can record video directly from the VCR's tuner

just hook the thing up to your computer on TV-out or your DVD player and record, no DRM problem.

Microsoft Personal Media Center...

[ScottKin]

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.

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 .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.

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

PDA maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:I wonder.. - Linux with portable audio players

[wehe]

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.

its supposedly comming out next week

[falcon5768]

Seriously, for their high end model supposedly it will have AV hookups so it will play whatever movies you have stored in your movies folder on your HD. You wont be able to play it on screen, only on a TV but I think thats a better move than playing it on a little 2 inch screen anyway....

who wants to watch movies on a 2 inch screen????

Before you say pictures, supposedly it will have a color screen and yes you will be able to view pictures on it, just not movies.

Course this is all rumor, but you never know, we already DO know the next gen iPod will have encode on the fly and the ability to do color from leaked memos from the chip manufacturer.

Replay Plays Well With Archos

[meehawl]

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.