Sunday, August 10, 2008

http://williamcooleyblogs.blogspot.com/

One of the main concerns portable video player enthusiasts lies in the fact that not every good looking player will in fact support the video formats they use the most. For instance some people love the AVI container, other simply like WMV better and others just use a specific format because their favorite media is encoded using such codec.

For many of us, buying an expensive MP3-video player which doesn't play the desired format is a total pain and things get even worse when we have to use brute PC power to re-encode the media we want to watch on our players, this is why it is very important that the player we are buying supports the container we use the most.

It would be safe to say that AVI is one of the most popular video containers used to share video files on the internet, this container can be H.264, DivX or Xvid compressed these are all video codecs which may be used to produce videos. Another popular format is the MPG container which is one of the older formats around, they may be found in MPG-1 and MPG-2 for DVDs; yet another container which is mostly used by Japanese fan-sub animation fans is the MKV container which can have several audio and subtitle streams all in one file.

The formats supported by the Zen vision W are: MPG1, AVI (Divx, Xvid) and WMV at a maximum resolution of 720X640 which is really good for a portable player which can be connected to a TV in order to watch the movie at full resolution on a bigger screen. At 30GB the amount of movies which can be stored using any of the codecs mentioned can be of up to 42 - 700MB movies, this number may vary according to the bit-rate used to encode each video.

The MKV container is not yet supported but there are other devices which do, however some people don't want to sacrifice the player aesthetics and price in order to get an extra format. An good feature anime lovers will find useful is the picture display capabilities which can be used to read mangas, all others will find the space and compatibility features just perfect.

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