Rumz

Wow... that sounds like a hassle. So not so easy as just telling handbrake to rip h.264 / AAC @ 48Khz / 29.97fps, huh? I mean that in and of itself is pretty finicky... but to have to use another program to tag it right... wow. Maybe I should hold off just yet... and this pickiness isn't something that has been resolved by firmware updates, huh? I certainly hope that if Sony releases a device geared specifically towards portable video playback (not a game console) that it isn't this picky...

So whats the difference between memory stick pro and memory stick pro duo? Will either work in a PSP? Is 4gb the largest capacity currently available?

Pretty sure the admin told me about it directly (Ishi and Chris)

Haha, well my brother doesn't have one but based on the comments of those here, the PSP seems like a worthy investment as a portable video player. For less than $300 I could have a PSP + 2gb of memory-- perfect. I have several videos encoded already to 320x240, now that I think about it-- but they were done in Nero for playback on my cell phone and quality is lacking on the (the screen on my cell phone (Treo 650) is just 320x240)-- not quite big enough for use at the gym. Thanks for all your comments. As a side comment, any must-have games out there? Can't say I play console cames much but I might as well look into them as this thing does play them

Thanks for all your replies, so far. One or 2 more questions: Encoding issues aside, could the PSP *play back* a video file encoded at 480 x 272? What about a larger sized video (ie native resolution of the DVD-- can the PSP downscale that to play it?) I imagine battery life would be somewhat less with larger files? There is a Mac program called HandBrake that I use to encode DVDs to h.264, which allows me to scale videos to whatever size I need (this program is 100% free, too!) Also this machine has 2 gb ram and a dual core 2.16 processor, so it has enough muscle to do some 2-pass h.264 encoding (I've already encoded several DVDs, just not at PSP resolutions). One last question that popped into mind: for those of you playing videos off a 1gb+ memory stick, is it just a standard memory stick? IE, do you need something faster like the "ultra" variety that sandisk has?

So I saw the PSP at a store today, $199 for the barebones system. Add that to the fact that 2gb memory stick flash cards are reasonably cheap, and this starts to look appealing as a video player-- screen is decent-sized and a pretty slim profile. (That and I'm getting tired to waiting for the rumored widescreen video iPod). So, anyone out there use theirs as a video player? Obviously it plays back UMD media but I'm not really interested in that. It sounds like, from one thread on here, that there may be an issue with ghosting. Is this true? How watchable are action movies on the PSP? I take it that the PSP will play back h.264 mp4 files? What resolution is the PSP screen (or better yet, whats optimum size / resolution for video files for playback on PSP?) What's battery life like when playing back video off the PSP? (I imagine H.264 is taxing, what other video formats does it support?) Mainly I'd like to have something not quite so large as a portable DVD player to watch TV shows at the gym. How do 4:3 formatted videos look on the screen, are they watchable (large enough)? A video player is the only use I'd have for the PSP-- I don't plan on playing any games on it. Any alternative video players you'd recommend that have a pretty decent profile and price? I don't mind the 2gb limit as I'd just load a few episodes of a TV show on to take to the gym, as long as I get a couple hours of battery life I'm set. Sorry if I've asked a ton of questions-- thanks for any light you can shed on the PSP for me

I have to say that I've been tossing my A608 around for quite some time now without any kind of special protective cases (it spends all day on a lanyard around my neck too), and I haven't noted any scratches. What I do see is that dust has gotten under plastic to where I'll have to disassemble it to get the dust out, so perhaps a protective case would be good for keeping dust out of the unit.

Thanks for checking that out for me. Too bad really, but one can only hope it's something they implement in the future... unless they want to keep that as a selling point for Atrac3+...

I have a few questions... I've heard that AAC *can* be gapless if it's ripped/encoded properly (IE last time I checked, which was a long time ago so this may not be accurate, iTunes did not rip gapless AAC, but programs like Nero could). Is this right? Next question is whether the AAC that Sonic Stage w/ Connect rips is gapless (Did I read correctly that it will encode AAC?) And lastly, whether it plays back gaplessly on those players that got firmware updates to support AAC (A1000/1200/3000, E00x players). I'm not considering any of the above-mentioned players, but thought it might be an indicator for the future if they did support gapless AAC by some miracle. A1000/3000 users, any experience with this yet?

Actually I had this problem last night after plugging my Vaio Pocket in after a few months of not using it. Though for me it turns out the issue was that the USB 2.0 card wasn't working-- I haven't tried to troubleshoot it yet (could be loose / need to be reseated since I recently moved that computer) or maybe something else is wrong with the usb 2.0 card, but in any case, I checked the device manager in windows and it shows that the device isn't functioning. I plugged the VP into the built-in USB 1.1 port and my computer saw it just fine... so I let it transfer my tracks the long way since I wasn't in a position to troubleshoot the 2.0 card. So yeah... try a different USB port and check to see if anything's wrong in device manager.

Glad I'm using OS X these days

Actually I do have an extra kicking around-- I've got 2 My Vaio Pocket has been collecting dust for several months (nothing better has shown up-- I simply have not done much with music recently and hence have just used my flash players for the most part). In any case, I could probably part with one of my cradles if you wanted to buy one, since I'll probably only use just the one cradle going forward. I bought an extra one from Sony Parts for an exorbitant amount of money about a year back, seems like I paid around $70 for it all in all.

Yeah the foamies work best for me on the Shure E3 as well... I guess if I wonder if the bass is better on the E4 than the E3. I do enjoy some of the same music (that 80s brit-pop as you call it) on open phones more than on the E3, so your review is helpful.

I actually can't imagine that being too difficult, Ishi. I have an Apple bluetooth keyboard and I did get it set up in Windows XP without a hitch-- I just don't know if the volume up/down/mute keys are functional, I didn't test them. The eject key should work though. Basically bootcamp just creates a windows driver install cd. I'll see if I can create an image though I don't know how you'd test it. Is the Apple keyboard known to not normally pair with regular bluetooth or is it the functionality of those extra keys that you're after? I know this question was not directed at me but I can say that it does work great-- I had one minor issue getting it running which was a simple fix. Other people who have had trouble seem to be those who have previously used the hacked dual boot method and / or have very little hard drive space left on their Intel Macs. I imagine it is just a matter of time. Essentially, in order to run the Apple Boot Camp software / dual boot, you have to first update the firmware on your machine. Basically the firmware update adds BIOS support that Intel Macs originally lacked (they had EFI with no Bios support layer). I think there may have already been some limited success booting into certain flavors of Linux-- I'd check out http://www.osx86project.org and it's forums for more on what people are able to do with this solution. Also of note is that today a free beta of some Virtualization software was released for Intel Macs: http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/ I will definitely give this a go-- this would seem more ideal for light windows use such as running Sonic Stage. With windows both dual booting and running in as a virtual machine on my laptop, I may be able to make some general comparisons in speed for things like SonicStage and decide if it's usable enough. The main thing is that anyone who buys a new Mac now (assuming it's Intel) should now not be left in the cold when it comes to getting the most out of their Sony gadgets

A long time PC enthusiast, I recently jumped ship and joined the dark side Being in the design field it makes sense to use a Mac... but even after I decided that I wanted one for personal use (not just at the office), I waited. Apple announced they'd be moving to Intel last June. Then when they announced the MacBook Pro in January I jumped on it. And today (well yesterday), the 5th of April, Apple announced a form of official support for Windows XP on Intel Macs (there was a contest before now to get Xp running on a Mac but the solution lacked proper video drivers). Smooth-- makes installing XP on a Mac a breeze. So there you have it-- I'm sitting here posting from Windows on a maxed out MacBook Pro-- Intel Core Duo 2.16ghz, 2gb RAM, 100gb 7200 rpm drive HDD, a Radeon x1600 mobile w/ 256mb vram-- this is about as desktop replacement as they come, and it's thin, elegant, and runs both Mac OS X and Windows XP without a hitch. I could ditch my desktop if I wanted... this thing will run SonicStage no doubt. Most of the time I'll run OS X-- but for my network walkman and possibly Hi-MD, I can just boot into Windows (yeah virtualization might be better for such tasks-- I'll test those solutions when they come. Let's be honest-- the main reason I wanted to get XP going on here was to play games, that's where booting into the OS comes in handy). In any case, I'll report back when I have SonicStage 3.4 installed to verify that there are no issues (can't imagine what issues there could be, but you never know).

I guess the A680 doesn't count Regardless, thus far I use EAC + Lame to rip to Mp3 and import them into the Connect Library. If I do something I want to be gapless I'll do Atrac3plus 320kbps.

Does the reset button do nothing?

And with sound quality being as close as bangraman says, it boils down to whether / how you like to color your music (ie EQ it, etc) as well as what other features are important (type of UI, software, formats, etc.) I find that for minimal differences in sound quality like that, other factors come into play like the headphones you're using. In the end, I find that I personally simply adjust to the sound signature of a given player as long as it meets a certain minimum quality requirement.

Yeah I'd be interested in a downloadable file as well. My Connect has never updated properly and last time it looked like it wasn't downloading at all.

One of the reasons I never bought a 400/500 series player was that it was USB 1.1 (to my understanding-- the E107 sure is).

With the latest firmware gapless is automatic. The key is that the file format you're using must be gapless as well: Atrac3plus is gapless, however, mp3 is not. If you're listening to MP3s, there's likely to be at least a small gap between your songs. Ripping a CD in Atrac3plus in Sonic Stage should do the trick for you, as far as gapless is concerned.

Question: why does CP look for a floppy drive? I don't have a floppy drive in my machine (no a: drive) yet every time I start CP I get an error saying the A:\ drive is not ready. One other comment: Adding tracks to my player seems to take an unnecessarily long time. First, when I plug in the player while Connect is running, it checks all the tracks on the player-- or at least it says it's doing something like that. Then what I did next was take a new playlist with new files that I had just ripped and dragged the playlist icon over to the A608 icon. I thought it would just transfer the files over and I'd be fine, should be a breeze... nope. I click on the A608 icon to see what it's doing and it's checking each file on my A608 (like it's syncing or something, even though I have it set to manual sync) one by one before getting to the files that needed transferring. As a result it took several minutes to add those new files to the player instead of a few seconds. Is this due to the fact that I sent them over via playlist? If I had transferred them over without a playlist and sent a playlist over later would it have been a lot faster? Sorry I didn't have time to do any more experimenting this morning. In any case, it seems like there's got to be a more efficient way to update the player without acting like it's re-exporting every file that's already on the player.

Somehow I thought it might be there My apologies for not having spent enough time with the Connect Player yet. I only tried for a moment to see if I could pull up some new fields in the library-- right clicking up at the field headers didn't allow me to modify the fields like some other programs do. At least it's there-- thanks

You hit the button to create a new playlist and it crashed, or at what point did it crash during the process? I made a playlist no sweat. Created a new one, highlighted a bunch of tracks from my library, dragged them to the playlist's icon, then clicked on the playlist and organized the tracks. Perhaps it helps that I don't have thousands of tracks imported into connect player...

It really depends on how quickly you can navigate your library as to how easy / cumbersome on-the-fly playlist creation would be. On the Vaio Pocket, it was a bit cumbersome to make playlists on the fly. Easy process but sluggish performance when navigating the player prevented me from doing it much. I much prefer making lists on the PC and transferring them over (I'm so stoked that Connect Player makes this so easy), but in a pinch it would be nice to have a method to make a short playlist from the tracks existing on the player. Of the 2 I'd take playlist creation on the PC any day.