I'm thinking I might buy a portable video player, namely to keep me occupied on an upcoming flight. Looking around, I see a few contenders. I owned a first generation iPod. I eventually came to hate it for a few reasons: -Poor battery life -Can't change the batter -Unresponsive buttons (have to press them hard sometimes) I hear a lot of this is fixed w/ later ones, except for the battery life (3 hours of video only?), and not being able to change the battery. My latest MP3 player is a Creative Zen Micro. It is good, except for following which do drive me a little insane. -Takes much longer to boot -Queuing takes longer -- overall, I'd say the navigation seems more sluggish. So, the Zen Vision I'm going to say is out. Anyone have another suggestion. I'm mainly looking for good batter life (4 hours +) and soemthing relatively compact. I'm also wanting to watch DVDs I rip, and the occasional TV show I download. What about a PSP? There are really no games out there that make me want to buy this thing. It is rather big for just a video player, but it seems that you can load video files onto Sony Memory Sticks (rather) painlessly. Anyone care to elaborate on that?
PSP is a pretty good video player. I was going to recomend it before i saw the bottom of your post. It has the biggest and nicest screen out of anything out there (not counting dedicated dvd players). PSP boots quick, you can pop out the battery, and you can store your videos on memory sticks. I seem to get a good 5-6 hours off of one charge, but ymmv. The one drawback from your requests is the size, the thing is huge.
Transfers etc. to the PSP are fine, just done in a normal file browser. They need to be in the corect format, but thats got to be done with most players. Avoid the PSP however because A) 2gb max storage capacity at the moment B) (unless this has been changed in more up to date firmwares) Videos cannot be played in widescreen. You can put a video in 16:9 aspect ratio, but it will simply be in a box instead of filling the screen. 4:3 has bars on either side. This is intentional crippling to make you buy UMD movies C) battery for solid video watching is 4 hours on a good day - hardly different to iPod. Go for a dedicated device, not a 1/2 way house like the iPod or PSP Go with the iPod if you like them and want an MP3 player with the auxillary use of a video player, otherwise just buy an archos or something that is designed from the ground up to be used with video
Interesting posts. Steadesters cons are definitely worth mentioning, but considering MOST of the videos I will be watching will be from TV, I can live w/o 16:9, although it would be nice. Also 2gb storage per card isn't that bad. Most TV shows are 350MB, so that's at least 5 episodes per stick. No sweat there. 4 hours on a good day seems good. iPod I believe is 3 on a good day, and often less. At least from the reviews I've read. And yeah -- the dedicated device is the way I want to go, but the only people making them so far are Archos and other off-beat companies I've never heard of. Reading around, Archos stuff seems to be good if it works, but doesn't seem that they are built to last. I've got a portable DVD player which isn't bad. I can definitely live with it for a while. Before my next trip, I can always make a few DVDs from downloads as well. In short, I'm prepared to wait for a good product.
If I'd be you I'd also try to avoid the PSP...because if i have that huge screen and can't use it for videos except the UMD ones...it's dead for me. But those new Cyberhome ones seem pretty damn cool, read about them here: http://mobilitytoday.com/news/mobility_Cyberhome_Personal_media player.html A good site for information about PVPs is PVP4U. Could be interesting for you.
