f13.net

I attended a Microsoft seminar on exchange servers, mistakenly expecting a technical demonstration for the engineers and winding up with a sales pitch to managers.  But I wound up winning the door prize, a Creative Zen Vision media player.  On it, I can play video and music files on a little 640x480 screen, it's got a 30 gig hard drive in it.

Now for the important question: Why the hell would I want to?

I really can't think of any driving need in my soul to watch a movie on a tiny-ass screen.  I have a perfectly good iPod nano that's a tiny fraction of the size and weight for playing music.  Can anyone think of a worthwhile use for this thing other than eBaying it for some free cash?

Hmm, riding a train to assnowhereland without a notebook? Intercontinental flights?

No clue, really. I'm perfectly fine with my mp3-Player as well. Most times I use him I don't need my ears but my eyes are needed to avoid all that falling down and breaking your neck thing.

The only use I might see for media players besides music is massive portable picture storage. I couldn't make much use of video though.

I don't understand the use of it either.  The picture thing would be ok, but I don't understand it either.  I don't really ever feel the urge to look at pictures I've taken throughout the day.  Plus the urge to show people my pictures would just be annoying.  It is bad enough to annoy people with pictures of my kids the standard way, 2-3 paper pictures.  Now, you can waste a full 15 minutes going through 1000 slides of your kids from current age back to birth!  Yay!?

I would rather use the cash to have more songs and audio books on my player.  Now THAT is something I crave all day long everyday.

As has been said it's mostly for if you have a long wait somewhere such as a flight, road trip, train ride or the DMV.  As a gamer I would be happier with a PSP but YMMV.

The head-scratcher for me is UMD.

Yep, that's the one. It's for people who have long stretches of time where they can't do much of anything.

I have a portable DVD player.....But no trains in sight. Even that, with it's pretty screen, is useless to me.

Yup, when I fly cross country during convention season I usually put a few GBs of movies on my Ipod and watch them that way. Mainly because the office won't spring for a lap top with a decent battery life, but between the two I can usually remain entertained all the way to Florida.

I have no clue. Send it to me, I'll load it up with TV shows and movies and sit it in one of the house bathrooms. We'll find out if it has any use.

What the fuck are you thinking? Of course it's useful.

If you need a good use for it send it to a troop in Iraq/the Middle East.  Those things are Godly;  hard to understand until you have been stuck somewhere with nothing to do 99% of the time.

I fought a battle against my urges on buying a Video Ipod a few weeks ago.  I kinda got caught up in all the hoombla.

Finally realized the only use I'd have for one is to take it to the gym with me.  That's it.  Other than that, it's still a useful 30gb music player.

That's probably the best use for it there is.

I also use mine to transfer pictures to from my camera when I'm out shooting. Its a lot cheaper than buying multiple 1GB CF cards.

I'll just chime in that I would have no use, currently, for a mobile video player.

I've only used my music player lightly in the last couple of months.

Basically, you can use it anywhere you'd read a book except at home.

These days, I mostly use my PSP for watching Deadwood episodes while commuting.

The new iPod has a too small screen. The one on the Zen Vision is just fine (allthough the viewing angle is crap). The PSP has the best screen for this stuff, but lacks the harddrive - the one I want, is the Archos AV500. It's brilliant:

It's a (passable) PVR.
It's a photoviewer (I like ti show pictures to family, without resorting to the cameras small screen or dragging them to my computer)
It's a photobank (I you don't see the use of this, then you're not taking photography serious - I get 80 RAW images on one 1GB card. Somewhere to offload them on a longer trip would be nice)
It's a MP3-player.
It's a movieplayer (I travel on business and I commute daily. I also have tonnes of tv-shows I don't have the sparetime to watch - can you see how the combination works out here?)

If you don't get it, pass it on to someone who does. While I don't support the war in Iraq, the idea of filling one of these with half porn and half BSG and other worthwhile shows ad sending it to a soldier appeals to me.

It really would make some extremely happy, pr0n would be happy ++.  My brother is in Iraq, and I could possibly get him to find a special person you can send this to.  Assuming you are not able to find someone yourself, and assuming you want to.

Portable media players are small and expensive. They are easy to steal, easy to lose, easy to break. They are evil tools of insurance underwriters.

Right. Because the bastards never steal the big stuff... like cars.

So your solution is becoming this guy?
(http://www.1adventure.com/archives/images/homeless-man-merida-lowres.jpg)


Allthough I'm pretty sure, they steal each others cardboard too...

At least your car can't fall out of your handbag and you don't generally leave it on the train.

It only has no use if you have both an mp3 player and a notebook pc everywhere you go.

If you only have an mp3 player this is your bulk file storage and video player.

If you only have a notebook this is your mp3 player.
 
As for when you'd need a video player, you clearly haven't stayed in enough hotels. Having to put up with broadcast TV? Often in foreign languages? Ugh.

I can't imagine actually buying something like this ofc, but if I didn't have an mp3 player and notebook I'd be all over it.

It's christmas, is there not anyone you know who lacks either an mp3 player or a notebook?

Can somebody clarify something for me?  On iPods, can you freely access it like a portable usb drive, and put what ever files you want on it (word documents, pictures, ect.)?  I remember hearing that it wouldn't let you, but that might have been back in the early days of iPod.  Does it vary from model to model?  I think its been hinted to me that I will be recieving an iPod of some sort for Christmas when I go home to visit, and I'm just curious if it is able to do this, like most other portable mp3 players I know.  I normally wouldn't ever buy an iPod in particular, since Apple overcharges for their stupid, trendy, ass ugly shit, but I guess it would be ok if somebody bought one for me, heh.  If I have to jump through any loops to store random data on it though, guess I'll have to return it for something else.

And why do they have to make all the iPods look like ass....

The nano is sexy, but I like Chrome and tiny.   I've had it for less than a day, but from what I can tell you can't just drag and drop anything you please onto it.

You can drag and drop onto an iPod, it just takes a couple obnoxious steps.  Fire up iTunes, plug in the iPod, wait for everything to finish connecting and whatnot.  Click on the iPod icon in the lower right hand corner of the iTunes window.  In that option menu is a setting to be able to dump whatever files you like onto the iPod.

Gah, yeah, that right there is what I was afraid of.  So damn annoying.

Now I have to figure out some way of getting to return the damn thing without offending my mom.

I could never use a nano or any dinky flash based media player. I find them almost as useless as the portable movie players this thread was originally about.

The iPod Shuffle works just like a flash drive. Plug it in and dump files on the drive. However, it's a piece of shit because it won't read mp3s off itself like that. It has to have iTunes or vPod or whatever write a little directory index for it to play the mp3s.

I only have one because Schwab is giving them away in exchange for a credit card signup. I can't resist free shit even though I never use it.

Its not as bad as it sounds Teleku. If you change one setting in iTunes, it lets the ipod connect as a removable drive by default. So essentially; I plug in the ipod, let iTunes connect it and check if it needs updated (about 20 seconds total), close/minimize iTunes and use the thing like a portable drive. As long as its plugged in, I don't have to touch iTunes again until I want to eject the ipod.

I use mine to transfer pictures off my camera in the field. Since I shoot in RAW format, which ipod doesn't recognize, its just easier to cut and paste the pictures off of it like a drive.

Well, do I have to have iTunes installed on any computer I connect it to if I want to move files off of it?  It might not be so bad then, since I would upload alot of stuff to it from my home computer, but it sort of defeats the point of the portable drive if I have to have iTunes installed on every single computer I hook it up to if I want to access those files.

On another note, are you saying that you can directly hook your iPod up to your camera and move files to it that way?  Cause then that would be pretty awsome.  I have a digital camera I like to go out and shoot with and that would be very usefull.  I never really shoot in RAW, but having that much extra space at hand would help.

On a completly off topic note, do you feel RAW is really really better for shooting than just going to standard JPEG mode?  I mean, its good if you want to heavily edit the shot and maybe fix something you screwed up on, as I understand it, but I usually take a few shots of the same thing anyways to make sure I get a good one (and play with different settings).  Is there a real quality increase from RAW?  Just curious, as I know some people who swear by it, but I never really messed with it.

I mainly shoot RAW because of white balance editing and color correction. You can play with white balance, contrast, brightness, and individual colors as much as you want in RAW, but never lose any detail. JPEG, every change you make you lose detail.

Try this as an experiment if you have Photoshop: Open up a JPEG straight from your camera and look at the histogram - should look like a nice wavy mountain range. Now adjust the contrast, maybe the brightness, a few things like that. Check the histogram again, and you'll find its all spikey with gaps in it. That's all the data you destroyed when adjusting the JPEG, especially since JPEGs are only 8 bit files. You don't have that issue with RAW.

I especially use RAW when shooting in low light without a flash, as I find I can bring up the brightness way more without loosing detail than I can with JPEG. Downer of RAW of course is size. I get 114 RAWs / GB vs. 400 + JPGs.

As to the iPod - the camera adapter cost me an extra $25. I plug the cable from iPod to camera, click import on the iPod, and away it goes.

I don't know if you can access the iPod on a pc without iTunes installed, I haven't tried it. My guess is no though.

Comes up as an external hard drive. Right now my iPod is my Y: drive. I just use it to archive video.

This entire thread pisses me off.  Want to know why my name is Cheddar?  Its because I cannot break my cheese addiction.  I went a long time without cheese, and now love Cheddar.  Fuck all of you shallow pisses.  Yeah, Pisses.  Its a new term I thought up.

Or hope I thought it up.



Edit.  Just wanted to add trite.  Trite trite trite.

Hey, I like cheddar too (and you're not so bad yourself). It's the gold standard of cheese. Not too plain and not too much bite. It's perfectly in the middle.

Not commentary. I just like the card.

(http://www.wizards.com/global/images/magic/general/The_Cheese_Stands_Alone.jpg)

What? I figure the portable media aspect of the thread had run its course.

This is standard with the proper portable video players like the Archos, the Zen Vision and the Epson 4000 (the last one is squarely aimed at photographers).
And they all have better screens than the dinky iPod.
(and correct me if I'm wrong - even with that adapter, you can't actually view the images, right? You'd have to import them properly through a pc/mac and the right software).
The Zen Vision just takes a CF card and the Archos AV500 is a USB host. The Epson takes a range of cards and goes all the way to 100 GB (like the Archos) - so no photographer should ever run out of space.


... oh yeah, and they play video too.

If you are importing RAW files, then no, you can't view them on the iPod. Only if you are shooting jpgs or tifs. Admittedly yes, I could have gone with other portable drive solutions for the camera. It was just a case of the iPod giving me all the features I wanted, combined with the iPod interface (which I do like). The final deciding factor though was that I bought it on a business trip in San Fran, and since it was duty free going over the border (since I was down for a week) it ended up costing me $140 less than it would have up here.

I could have hunted down a non-ipod player during that trip, but I really didn't have time. So I walked in to the Apple store on my luch break and walked out with the iPod.

Boy, I sure do miss John Candy.

Well, of the ones mentioned above, only the Epson shows RAW pictures, but that is bulky as hell. I agree on the niceness of the iPod interface which nobody has beat yet, but if pictures is your main use, I'd still pick something with a better/bigger screen and less hoops required to show the pictures. Ymmw.

Ueah, No reason to say why I found this 10 year old thread, but I'm bumping it for laffs because we all carry one of these now.

Fuck what a difference time makes.

Is it sad that I skipped this craze and waited til I got a smartphone?   :awesome_for_real:

Oh yeah I still use cd's in my car.  lol

I have a tape deck in mine... that I have the tape adapter for to use with my smart phone. I refuse to modify the inside.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I carry a smartphone (but never use it for watching video), my tablet gets used a lot for surfing the net but very little for video. My daughter uses her iPad for movies in preference to larger screens, but if I want to watch video, walking about doesn't seem necessary.

So we may all carry one in the sense that we have a general purpose device that makes them useless, but not usually for that purpose.

-Dave

Still have an iPod. Very useful on vacation, by the pool, and especially on planes.

I've still got a functioning Zune but rarely use it; I listen to Pandora on my phone sometimes, and more rarely watch video on my tablet.

I have a Chromecast. I now use my smartphone or tablet to watch Netflix, Youtube, BBC iPlayer and other chromecast enabled crap on my old, non-smart TV. It also lets me stream cast video files (mp4, wkv and others) from my PC to my TV via a Chrome plugin.

I went through the whole "Why on earth would I want this?" to "Cannot live without it."  I even persuaded my boss to get one for the TV at work - nominally because it allows us to demo mobile apps on the big screen directly from a tablet but funny how the dev team are managing to find time on a Friday afternoon to watch films.  :grin:

Same here.  I love my iPod and use that to listen to music instead of on my phone.  Mostly because I'd have to hassle with converting stuff to put my library on the phone but also because my iPod battery lasts ages while the phone... not so much.

Never use the iPad unless my phone is dead for some inexplicable reason and too lazy to hold the laptop.

Core uses for a tablet that cannot be satisfied by a phone in my household:

Browsing with other people

Playing board games while travelling

Watching tv while travelling

Streaming music to the living room amp - yes I could use a phone, but then I have to fuck around taking control from the tablet, and worse, I'd have to give my phone to another human if they want to change the music (cold dead hands etc)

Sedating small children



My mp3 player is long lost. Kindle is going strong though.

Also:
Seeing things while old.

Jesus, you guys have been grown ups for way too long. It's for watching stuff at shit-level jobs and in class on the sly.

Well, most of us are out of school and many of us no longer have shit jobs.  Several of us require reading glasses now.

I found my old Moto Droid, the original one with the keyboard, and it's SUPER TINY compared to my S5.  Still plays the "sad trombone" sound but I don't want to surf the web on it.

Right, that's why so many people seem not see why someone would want them.

Pay attention in class and you might not have a shit job.

Do well at the shit job and you may not stay at the shit job.

Kids today.

I don't see any of the students in my classes with a Creative Labs Zen. Yes, many people, especially younger ones, use their smartphones as media playing devices, but that doesn't make their smartphones "portable media players" any more than my laptop is just because I watch movies on it sometimes. Portable media players as dedicated devices are pretty much deader than chivalry, even the portable/car DVD players are going away in favor of general-purpose tablets.

--Dave

I still like the iPod Shuffle for jogging. The Nano is ok too.

I use a Sansa 4gig micro in my car when I have to drive distance. T-Mobile, while cheap and strong in major cities, is complete shit in between them.

I'm not sure which is the least interesting thread currently active on f13, this or the car parking one.


... I have a Sony NWS that I use in the car because fuck CDs.

I use a USB stick in the car and I pull forward into spaces.