art taylor

Pursuant to an earlier post, I bought the Creative Zen Vision :W player in advance of a trip to NYC last week.

First off, this thing has just about the worst name in the world. It also has an awful splash screen at startup with a big "ZEN" that I would cover up with my hand so the guy sitting next to me wouldn't punch me in the nads.

That said, it's pretty groovy, with some serious downsides that make me think the PMP market is about where the GPS market was in 2004, right around the time the Nuvi came out and solidified things remarkably. 

I'll go through the problems with this player first, because they may be enough to make you run away. It's also about 90% of my content, because it's all well and good if it plays a nice music file, but if you can't use it, it's just a waste of money. Besides, you can get all the positive propaganda you want from the website. 

The first is that there is no official Mac support. It's an MTP (Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol) device, so all the software and support relates to Windows. This is obviously not an issue if all you have or care about is Windows support.

With XNJB, the lack of Mac support isn't a huge deal. You can still push media on, and pull it off, the player. You are pretty limited in media types (careful with ".mp4" files, which will go strange places) and you can't mess around with subfolders yet, but if you're just throwing something in the "Video" or "Music" directory for a train/plane ride, it'll be fine. XNJB is pretty fast over USB, as I was able to transfer a 700.9MB video in about 110 seconds. Not super fast and I wouldn't want to use it as an external drive, but acceptable.

Second, this thing is a brick. I was thinking about getting an iPod Video because it likes the Mac, is well-integrated into iTunes, etc., but when I thought about it, I preferred my Nano if I was actually carrying an iPod around during the day, and the iPod Video has a tiny screen compared to the Creative. It's just not a good compromise device. Instead, I decided to try the Creative as a video player and use a Nano for something I'd want in my pocket. The Creative is about 2-2.5x bigger than my old 3G 40GB iPod, and is less of an obvious "compromise device" than the iPod Video. However, as I mentioned, it's a frickin' brick and you're not going to be walking around with this in your pocket.

Third, codec support is pretty iffy. It doesn't like older versions of MSMPEG4, so if you ripped movies from DVD a few years ago, be ready to re-rip. I would strongly hesitate against transcoding (in general but especially in this case) because the video seems especially jumpy. It also doesn't like AAC or AC3 audio, and of course DRM support is nonexistent, so forget about using your iTunes Music Store files with this. Unfortunately, I ripped all my CDs to AAC and didn't feel up to converting them.

Transcoding audio is a lot easier than video. ffmpeg -i infile.avi -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -ab 192 outfile.avi works just fine, or you can use VLC's painful command line, which delegates to ffmpeg or mplayer anyway. It's important to avoid variable bit rate audio, because the audio will desync from the video, and then you'll get in that nasty situation where you can't look at actors' mouths without feeling a little sick.

It does seem pretty decent if you stick to the Video Format Recommendations for ZEN Vision/Vision:M page at Creative. The list is limited, but it's better than the iPod.

As for stability, it's a feature that isn't that important to this player. I had to pull the battery twice because I'd hit "Play" for a video and start to fast forward before the video had started. The player hung until I did a hard reset.

 

It's also incredibly sluggish -- seeking forward or backward can easily cause a 10-second delay before the video will start playing. The player is also unable to process additional seek requests in this period of time, so if I searched, lifted my finger, and searched again, I was out of luck. There's no visual cue when fast forwarding or rewinding, so it should be expected that a user will stop a lot to see where they are.

The last ding I'd make against it is that it has no stand. Some of the Archos devices have a little kickstand that folds out to hold the player up. I was constantly trying to find the right combination of soft but rough surfaces to prop the player up into a viewable angle. Some external cases do have the ability to do this, so consider one a prudent investment.

Those are the negative things, now for a couple brief positive things.

The picture quality is quite nice. It's watchable and not at all embarrassing. It's not great for slow pans or zooms, but for normal movies (and especially, movies on a plane that aren't on a washed out screen overhead or on a 120-degree laptop) it's great.

 
Widescreen video

 
A 4:3 video with black bars

The resolution is lower than some other players, but it's still a small screen, and the widescreen format is much better for watching ripped DVDs while on the road. The "screen door" effect hits at about 18 inches from the screen, depending on your eyesight.

The battery life is pretty good, as well. It takes a long time to charge (6h USB, 3h AC adapter), but I was able to watch three 1.5h movies on one charge and have enough left over to listen to a fair bit of an audio book, which uses less power.

Speaking of which, like many of the Creative devices, the audio is much better than an iPod. There's more control, and Creative apparently has some experience with electronic audio gear, and applied some of that knowledge and technology to their players. If your ears get tired of listening to your iPod for hours, you might look at one of the Creative devices, if you can stomach the industrial design.

Also, last but maybe not least, there's a speaker. This thing is so big it has a speaker. That's awesome for starting a movie or audio file while lying in bed at night. I don't like wearing earbuds when I don't have to, but I also don't like packing around speakers.

I didn't get a chance to try the A/V output, but I have it on good cyberauthority that it works about as well as the source material. I forgot my cables and couldn't try it on the hotel TV however.