Zune HD video playback battery life

J

JonathanJ

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 11, 2009
Messages
111
Today I tested my the Black Baron (Zune 120) to see how long the battery lasts through almost uninterrupted video playback, the results were surprisingly good: a bit over 6 hours. I made it through 3:10 to Yuma (02h 04m), Across the Universe (02h 13m), and part of Atonement (01h 43m) before the battery went kaput.

After a few too many bumps to the head, the Baron is developing some serious HDD-related problems that's caused certain songs to die and become unplayable, I think I may have to replace the Baron. Usually when the problem arises the song stops playing (maybe the audio but not necessarily the timer) and the HDD starts to chug. Sometimes it's whole song that's unplayable and other times it's parts of songs but it's always a problem. Either way, I feel I need to replace the Black Baron.

I want to know how the 3.x SSD-based Zunes and the Zune HD compare in battery life. Hopefully I can do this without turning this into a Zune v. iPod thread but I was also wondering how long video playback lasts with the iPod Touch. I was so shocked I had exceeded Microsoft's Zune estimates (04hrs video playback) by 50% that I told my roommate, who I knew would be 100% uninterested in anything Zune-related, about my results. He told me his Touch can play 8~10 hours of video with a lot of battery remaining. While I expected the iPod would do better in terms of batter than my 120 (it's much newer and I doubt the 3.x software has changed over the years dramatically) that sounds much better than anyone else has told me about the Touch.

Thanks in advance.

I use low screen brightness, wireless is off, and my volume was set to 8 as I was indoors.
 
8.5hrs according to Microsoft, I wanted to see what people saw in the real world.
 
Although I've watched some videos on my Zune HD, I have yet to watch anything over 10 to 15 minutes, and I've never let it run until the battery died. I do have some longer videos, so maybe at some point this week I'll put some stuff going and see how it does.
 
Jerome36 said:
Although I've watched some videos on my Zune HD, I have yet to watch anything over 10 to 15 minutes, and I've never let it run until the battery died. I do have some longer videos, so maybe at some point this week I'll put some stuff going and see how it does.
Click to expand...

If you could do that I'd love you eternally. :)
 
I've watched about 5 hours of video dipped from DVD9 on my HD with the battery indicator looking at about showing half capacity. I'll try to run it down but I'd say the 8.5 sounds reasonable from this observation.
 
Well I fully charged my Zune HD and then just played videos until the battery got so low the player shut itself off. Total playback time came to 6 hours and 39 minutes, and hopefully I did my math correctly. This is obviously below Microsoft's claims, but it could be because one of the videos I was playing was in HD, and the Zune was working a little harder then it would normally, down converting the video for the screen.

I only have a few videos on my device with most of those being some music videos. The only two videos that aren't are a 23 minute episode of Futurama (in SD), and then Battle of the X-Planes, from NOVA, with a run time of 1 hour and 53 minutes. That is the one that was in HD. I was able to play it THREE times, and the episode of Futurama once, before I got a "Low Battery" warning. After that warning I was able to play the Futurama episode from beginning to end a second time, and I then put it going for a third and the player shut off at the 14 minute mark.

I'm thinking if I just kept playing Futurama over and over again I would have gotten better battery life, but I didn't want to have to keep checking on it so often to put it playing again, when the X-Planes show was almost 2 hours, as opposed to only 30 minutes. So anyway, I suspect being that the video was in HD effected the battery life. Also, for the record I had the volume at 15 (with no EQ preset on) and the screen brightness was the default level.
 
I know this is an old thread to bring back up, but in a more recent Zune HD thread (found here) I brought up this old topic. I discovered an error on my part, in regards to playing the Battle of the X-Planes video, for my battery testing. It turns out the video wasn't in HD, so my battery life performance was based on a standard video.
 
Wild to think the MS player of all devices would have that added in, huh? But my phone has a bigger screen and a speaker so for now I'm still using Badaboom to convert.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top