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Okay I want to buy a handeld mediaplayer that will show video files like divx, MPEG and so on for use while comuting.

I was looking at Sony PSP but I try to avoid sony when I can.

Video iPod? Expensive, but AFAIK they play most file types, as well as havng big storage and being an mp3 player to boot.

The PSP has a far larger screen, however. Actually using the iPod screen for watching a video sounds painful. I don't know of any decent large- or wide-screen media players, but I *am* in Australia.

IRiver? Some kind of pda?

Faram wrote:Okay I want to buy a handeld mediaplayer that will show video files like divx, MPEG and so on for use while comuting.

I was looking at Sony PSP but I try to avoid sony when I can.

I'd suggest the iPod. 30 GB of goodness.

PSP is nice for the screen size, but it's lacking on storage. It costs $200-$250 to start with, then you have to buy a 4 GB card, and you only get 4 GB.

I originally bought a 60 GB iPod because I was going to be commuting 3 hours a day on the bus. Use Handbrake to rip all your DVD's (I think there's a Windows version now) straight to MPEG-4.

Make sure you acutally sit down and use whatever you plan on buying for 5-10 minutes. I couldn't stand the ipod's tiny screen and the zune wasn't much better. I know everyone is different, but these tiny screens just don't work for me.

The US retail price of the PSP seems to have fallen to $169, if that's a mark in its favor.

I'd go for the Creative Zen Vision, rather than the iPod. The iPod does some things that are really irritating, and doesn't play .avi files.

.avi files are rather hackish anyway. It never was designed to support variable rate encoding. Given the bitrate and resolution constraints on most portable devices, you'll need to reencode anyway. I'm happy with my iPod. I'd probably go insane if I tried to watch a full movie on it though.

Some of my cow-orkers use palm PDAs to watch movies on.

The PSP is a good option. Sure the most you can get is a 4gig card but the price is UMD movies has dropped dramatically in recent months and has the advantage of wireless internet and the games catalogue is starting to pick up.

I'd recommend a Zen or an iPod for the battery life. . .the PSP might work if you care about the screen and don't mind being hampered by the small capacity. Though the Archos Jukebox series are supposedly fairly good for screen, I'm not sure about format compatibility though.

Wow, so there's really no products between tiny, worthless screens like iPods and giant widescreen PSPs? Weird. And let's face it, anyone who uses anything but mp4 these days is crazy.

Stark wrote:Wow, so there's really no products between tiny, worthless screens like iPods and giant widescreen PSPs? Weird. And let's face it, anyone who uses anything but mp4 these days is crazy.

*stabs Stark for that last line*

I wish I could send an open letter to the TV show pirate community? Avi = fail, mp4 = win. Smaller at the same quality, no codec issues, more features, etc etc.

Oh and most importantly 'works on my 360'.

Stark wrote:I wish I could send an open letter to the TV show pirate community? Avi = fail, mp4 = win. Smaller at the same quality, no codec issues, more features, etc etc.

Oh and most importantly 'works on my 360'.

Isn't .avi supposed to be easier to encode than .mp4 in general?

Well from my limited experience mp4 encoders are just as freely available and actually EASIER to use than avi. This is from a guy who could never work out how to get decent results of of xvid, for instance - obviously you can if you know what you're doing, but with h.264 you don't have to: better quality/bitrate.

For instance, from my DVDs I can rip TV shows to smaller than pirate xvid versions, with like three clicks - if I tried to use xvid it'd take me ages to get good settings and it'd end up being larger. Yes, I am teh codec n00b.

I'd go with the Creative Zen Vision W. It has a pretty large screen, thirty gigs, and supports MPEG and DivX.
I bought a Zen Micro from them over a year ago and I've had good tech support from them. Even repaired the headphone jack of another Micro I bought off of eBay for free.

That's a nice device you have Soontir. Although it is rather pricey at nearly 300 USD. Is there something similar but with less memory costing less then 200 USD ?

Stark wrote:I wish I could send an open letter to the TV show pirate community? Avi = fail, mp4 = win. Smaller at the same quality, no codec issues, more features, etc etc.

Oh and most importantly 'works on my 360'.

I'll readily admit that .avi is inferior to other containers, although .mkv pisses me off because it's so fucking hard to convert it to MPEG-2 for easy DVD burning and playback. (or at least it was the last time I tried it)

Does .mp4 support soft-subtitles?

Sarevok wrote:That's a nice device you have Soontir. Although it is rather pricey at nearly 300 USD. Is there something similar but with less memory costing less then 200 USD ?

If you want it to play video? Outside of the PSP good luck finding anything. And only then if you're willing to use hacks and other workarounds to get videos to work.

Uraniun235 wrote:I'll readily admit that .avi is inferior to other containers, although .mkv pisses me off because it's so fucking hard to convert it to MPEG-2 for easy DVD burning and playback. (or at least it was the last time I tried it)

I only used .mkvs briefly (for anime, of course) and I had similar problems putting them on DVDs. The external subtitle file thing for older containers was clumsy as hell.

Uraniun235 wrote:Does .mp4 support soft-subtitles?

If you mean subtitles internal to the container, yeah they do. I've not used it yet, though.

Sarevok, there are other resellers like Amazon.com, BHPhoto.com, etc that sells it for less. You just have to look around. Current prices I've seen is around $270. Not much of a discount I suppose but given the rather large screen it's got on than other players, I would get it if ever felt I needed a video player.

Archos, Toshiba, and Coby sells video players as well but they have varying formats available. Toshiba for instance only plays WMVs...

As an overall package I'd definitely recommend the PSP over any iPod, regardless of the format. Interestingly, there's a site which can convert YouTube videos to .mp4 if you want to watch them on a PSP, or archive it period (in which can it can be in other formats).

Edward Yee wrote:As an overall package I'd definitely recommend the PSP over any iPod, regardless of the format. Interestingly, there's a site which can convert YouTube videos to .mp4 if you want to watch them on a PSP, or archive it period (in which can it can be in other formats).

There's also simple apps that do the same thing - not much point since youtube videos are so appallingly poor quality, but hey.

Isn't the PSP limited by the size of memory cards? 4gb makes a pretty worthless media player. I still can't believe there isn't anything with PSP-style screen that just plays media. Remember all those discman-like DVD players?

Edward Yee wrote:As an overall package I'd definitely recommend the PSP over any iPod, regardless of the format. Interestingly, there's a site which can convert YouTube videos to .mp4 if you want to watch them on a PSP, or archive it period (in which can it can be in other formats).

PSP and iPods play the same formats. But the iPod has quite literally hundreds of times more storage than a stock PSP, and still easily over a dozen times the storage of a maxed-out PSP.

There are portable screens for $99. I've seen them at Best Buy; there's a device with a 7" screen that has an iPod slot and DVD slot, so you can use it as a portable DVD player or portable iPod screen. Buy you might as well be lugging a small laptop...

Honestly, I found the iPod's screen size just fine. But I have 20/10 vision. Try it out yourself.