Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Creative Is First?

Creative has actually come out with a pretty cool product. Their new Zen Vision product is a "Portable Media Player", which is an mp3 player, photo viewer, and also plays video in different formats, divx and xvid being 2 popular codecs, plus wmv. I have to say, this looks really attractive, and i hope apple, who is rumored to be working on a video ipod will learn from this device. Apple, who has a history of being proprietary at times could forseeably only support quicktime with a version of their media player, and that for me would be a deal breaker, since ive been encoding alot of TV episodes to divx because of its quality and compression.

Id love to be able to watch episodes of TV i recorded on my elgato EyeTV and exported to divx while riding the train in the morning, and if apple doesnt support a variety of codecs and formats with theirs, im afraid it will be doomed to failure. ( i know, people said that when this version ipod wouldnt support WMA)

While listening to MacCast (a podcast) today, i heard the video ipod being compared to the Sony Watchman, and i dont think thats the case. The difference now is that there is a HUGE reliance on computers for music, movies and pictures. People would love to take that on the road, and they will be cheaper than a dvd player or a laptop. Also, with the PSP movie format, it proves to show that there is a market for portable movies. I cant wait to see what happens with this...but if there is no alternative from apple soon, i might nab this thing up in a few months.

Zen Vision

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