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Creative zen vision M or something else?

F

Fryguy8

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
1,707
I'm looking for a portable media player along the lines of a zen vision M or an ipod video. It's going to be mostly for subway use (I just moved to boston). Things I want are:

Minimum 3 hour battery life for video playback (this shouldn't be a problem)
10s of gigs of storage (a 4gb flash drive isn't big enough)

Easy management of an existing music collection. I'd like to avoid itunes if possible, and just have a simple drag and drop interface with windows, or easy support added to foobar.

Ability to play a wide variety of video/music formats. Notably mp3 (obviously), flac, wmv, xvid, quicktime .mov
 
How big would you like it? In terms of capability the Cowon A2 looks like your thing but it's (necessarily partly due to the screen size) a complete tank next to the slightly tanky Creative Zen Vision M. The iPod is ironically the better video player in terms of having a better screen in my experience despite reviews to the contrary but you need to transcode everything except for what you download in MPEG-4 / H.26whatver format. The Zen Vision M will play back DivX and XVid usually without any need for transcoding. DVD's will need transcoding as will many MPEG-2 videos.

The 30Gb iPod will only do two hours of video. Being practically half the thickness of the Zen and much more pocketable, it just hasn't got the space for extended-life batteries. The Zen VM will do 4, as will the 60Gb iPod (which is actually still smaller than the 30Gb Zen).

In terms of audio the Zen does WMA, MP3 and WAV, that's it. No lossless support. The iPod does Apple Lossless, which is pretty easy to transcode without loss from any existing FLAC library (use dbPoweramp).The Zen has FM radio and (pretty crappy) voice recorder built in, and will zoom into photos in the viewer but has no USBOTG support so you can't hook up a camera to it. The iPod has camera-only USBOTG via an accessory, doesn't really allow you to do much with photos except show them on the screen without zoom, and relies on add-ons for radio (the radio remote) but it is better than the Zen's. The recording facility is not yet available, but it will offer much higher quality than the Zen when it finally arrives.

I'm not sure why people find management using iTunes so difficult. To me software like this (or Mediamonkey, j.River Media Center - my favourite, etc) is essential if you have a decent-sized music collection. No way could I do it in Explorer.

I'm not going to do any raving about Rockbox for the iPod because it's far from complete and it's just nowhere near as usable as the reguar firmware but I'd suggest you look into it though. It basically turns the iPod into an iRiver :D

The Zen's about value. With what it comes with out of the box, the iPod can't touch it for bang for the buck. But you do get what you pay for... the ZVM is a less polished package overall. I have both, and I have uses for both but as I said, ironically I use the iPod to view videos more often as the ZVM screen screws up movies most of the time when I'm travelling by 'murking out' on me. If video is the main thing and you don't mind carrying a bigger player, the Cowon A2 looks like a nice choice because you get Cowon's combination of reasonable value, feature-stuffing and decent performance.
 
There is no player that can natively play both flac , xvid and mov files. Whatever you will choose you may have to transcode some files.

Ipod supports aac but does not support flac or ogg files, in fact few players do. In this respect A2 is more versatile. However Cowon players do not allow to manage music using id3 tags or so I was told. For best and biggest screen look at Archos AV500. It is expensive but it fully replaces DVR (can record video from TV).

Myself I finally bought Zen Vision M. Best value for the price. No complaints about sound quality. Most movie clips I had on PC played back without need for transcoding which is a good thing, too. Screen is very good quality, colours are bright, sometimes even oversaturated, but you can adjust brightness and all, so no problems here.
Navigation is easy, and there is this context menu (think of it as a "right-mouse-button") that gives a quick access to extra settings at any stage.
FM tuner works okay but it does not display radio statio which was bit disappointing.

As for voice recording all portable devices have cheap omni condenser mics. They work fine if you are in a quiet environment, but they suck outside. I wish companies employed some type of noise canceling technology but have not heard of any implementation of it in mp3 players so far.
 
I could care less about the recorder and the fm tuner, I just care about Video/audio playback.

I guess flac support isn't that important, since I'm going to be on a noisy subway anyway, even a set of noise cancelling earbuds aren't going to get me an experience that justifies lossless.

So I just need mp3 support for audio then. My entire collection is either lossless or mp3, so it's easy enough to just transcode flac to mp3 using foobar (I have it set up in my context menu to do it in like 3 clicks).

As for music playback, is there an easy to use utility to transcode stuff to ipod video format? I don't want to have to mess around with like tmpgenc multiple times a week to encode stuff. I'd like a nice easy 2-click interface to do it for a wide variety of video formats (I download a lot of content from the web, and would potentially do DVDs as well).

Realistically I'm probably going to be using audio most of the time, so I'm not sure how important the video is going to be to me.
 
Any more thoughts guys? I've been looking around at these and it really seems like it's down to these 2.

The price different is pretty negligible 285ish for ipod and around the same for the zen.

Does ipod support drag and drop from windows explorer? Or has there been software written to extend windows explorer for this functionality?

Also, how long would it take to encode something like a 1 hour xvid of sopranos to ipod format on a reasonable spec computer (athlon64 3000+ with a gig of ram)

I have about 1.5 hours of travel a day, with maybe being a bit more depending on when subways/shuttles show up, so the 2 hour limit on video, while close, probably isn't a big deal because I doubt I'll ever watch anything that's more than an hour, and then just listen to music for the rest of the time.

Edit:

Err is it even worth it for the zen vision M when I can get a zen sleek for much less? Obviously it doesn't do video, but it's a lot less money, and I have a lot of music. I'm not so sure that watching a video on the subway into work is worth an extra $100...
 
The Vision:M is worth it. The screen blows the Ipod Video's away (Ronco is blind if he thinks the Ipod's is better) and has over double the battery life while viewing videos. That was the clincher for me. What's the point of owning a video player that can barely play a full length movie. In reality the Vision:M isn't that much bigger than the Ipod once you get them in your hands either. I never leave my house without mine and it slips into my pocket nicely. If you have access to Newsgroups it's also nice not to have to re-encode Xvid and Divx files and if you have a Tivo you can simply transfer recorded shows straight to the player. Menu navigation is a breeze on the Vision as well. The only thing the Vision:M doesn't have is accessory support but 99.9% of them are absolutely retarded anyway and the modding community is slow with the Vision:M.

The two things I'd recommend getting is an Invisible Shield (www.shieldzone.com) and a good set of headphones to block out noise like the Etymotic Research ER6i. Both are expensive but worth it. There are cheaper versions of the Invisible Shield but their customer support and replacement policies are out of this world. Good headphones are nice too but you get what you pay for in that department and since you'll be riding the subway headphones that block out 36dB will save your ears and allow you to enjoy the music rather than trying to drown out the surrounding noise.
 
Yah, I'm just wondering at this point if getting something like a zen sleek and giving up the video playback altogether to save $100 might be worthwhile. Probably not.

I fully intend to get some noise blocking earbuds (or maybe some moderate sealed headphones like maybe something along the lines of senn hd497s) along with some sort of protection for the unit.
 
I didn't think I'd use the video feature much but after buying I've used it quite a lot. That's up to each individual user and what they'll be doing with the player. If you're on the subway I think noise blocking earbuds are the way to go. I like the ER earbuds because they have an actual foam earplug attachment. I've yet to find an earbud that can block out as much noise as they do.
 
Apple's next gen video iPod should be coming out sometime this summer. If you aren't in a hurry I would wait.
 
Yah I ended up with a Zen vision M. Found one in a circuit city today (they have been sold out everywhere) so I just picked it up.

I'm THOROUGHLY impressed with it. Now just need to find some good canalphones and a good skin for it and I'm set.

I'm leaning towards www.bestskinsever.com but I'm not sure.
 
The Best Skin Ever is the same thing as the Invisishield. They just don't have the lifetime warranty. I've used my warranty already.....any time you have to send the player back to Creative or it scratches just peel it off and mail it to them and they'll replace it. When my player took a long header on to a concrete floor I had to get send it back to Creative to get a chipped button fixed....Invisishield sent me a new one no questions asked.
 
well, invisishield is what, like $20? and the BSE is like $6? So I'd have to replace it like 3+ times before I show a profit on the warranty.

Eh I'll just get the BSE
 
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