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iRiver Ships Linux Media Players
prostoalex writes "The Register talks about new Linux-based portable media players available from iRiver. PMP-120 and PMP-140 feature 3.5'' color screen and 20 and 40 GB drives. The price tag is $500 and $600 respectively. The players support MP3, WMA, WAV and ASF music formats as well as MPEG, ASF, AVI and DivX video formats."
Yet, at the bottom, there's the following:
About iRiver
iRiver is the leading innovator in delivering portable digital media devices. iRiver provides consumers with the viewing, listening and recording flexibility to accommodate their active lifestyles by manufacturing award-winning hybrid products supporting existing and emerging formats, including MP3, OGG, ASF, WMA and WMA-DRM. Milpitas-based iRiver America, Inc. can be found on the Web at www.iRiverAmerica.com.
(emphasis of 'OGG' mine)
Ok the official specs say no ogg, but maybe that is a misprint. But here they say it has ogg.
Was Ogg support the cause for the long delay?
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Actually, I seriously looked at one these players around a month ago and I'm positive they were selling in the UK then, because online merchants (including Amazon) were saying they had stock. But in the end, I went for the smaller H340 music only player as these looked a little too big. Plus I'd spend all my life converting .avi's into the 320x160 (I think) format required for optimal viewing...
The human ear can only detect sounds between 20Hz and about 20kHz (some people can hear higer, some cannot hear frequencies that high).
Audio is typically sampled at 44kHz to eliminate aliasing distortion. Google for "Nyquist" and "aliasing distortion" for more than you could ever possibly want to know.
Go here for UK availability on the PMP-140 .... and prices... and a photo it looks a bit like a pre-gameboy era electronic game gadget... and it's gold are they all gold I wonder/
The pmp120 looks more like it belongs in with the "now"...
UK Laptops
What the hell are you smoking?
They work with any OS (and I have tried mine with OSX, Linux and Windows), and need no configuration. They do show up as removable storage.
There is a program called "iripdb" which you can use in place of the iriver's database ripper. It's open source so you can theoretically compile it for any platform.
the neuros plays oggs, and connects as a standard USB hard drive. I didn't need any software to plug it into Win2k or WinXP
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
There was a display model at a Best Buy near me (I think, it was one of those stores). I found it difficult to navigate through the menus and such and it took me about 5 minutes before I could get a song to play. There were no video files on the device so I couldn't test the video quality. All I know is that at the price they wanted, this player was too much of a hassle to use. And now that I'm reading about the lack of OGG support, that almost defeats the purpose of buying an iRiver.
The Karma has the HonestToGoodnessZeroSecondOneTrackPlaysIntoTheNex
You can't play two arbitrary MP3s "back to back" without the potential for silent gaps. It doesn't mean anything to ask for this, and so when you do, what you get is a cross fade.
MPEG audio layer 3 was not intended for ripping your CDs onto a flash memory device and walking around listening to the music. It was conceived as the high performance variant in a family of algorithms for use in streaming media. When you change TV channels or radio channels it isn't "seamless" so this wasn't a requirement. As a result the last block of audio in an MP3 must be a fullsize block, so the encoder fills the remaining fraction of a second with silence or something equally uninteresting. During playback there is no reliable mechanism to determine where in the last block this filler material begins.
(You may see a similar phenomenon if you try to skip to a particular track in a "seamless" CD album. CDs are also stored as individuals blocks, and a track can only begin and end with a whole block, so tracks actually don't start and stop exactly where you'd like them to. In fact with Red Book Audio as written there has to be a short silent gap between tracks. Customers don't much like this, so the CDs you buy in the shops don't always obey this restriction, they simply put the track start/ stop markers as close to the real start and end of the track as is possible)
Ogg Vorbis includes the necessary tweaks to make gapless playback possible in theory. So a CD track can be stored as an Ogg without tagging any silence on the end as filler. Of course the player still has to do the necessary buffering to smoothly transition from one track to the next without a pause of any kind. But it's at least possible to really do gapless playback instead of silly cross-fading tricks.
yes, Nyquist theory says that you must sample a signal at twice its frequency to accuractely reproduce it.