I want a small flash based OGG portable player

S

Sxotty

Legend
The current crop of ogg players
RIO
http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/sh...odel=220&cat=56
iriver
http://www.iriver.com/product/info.asp?p_name=iHP-120
and one other that seems pretty flaky to me.
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
Unfortunately for me, they are all HD based I would rather have flash memory that is only 512mb, then a 20GB HD that might break while I run or crash my bike.

I always have a fear that a HD based machine will be harder on batteries, more fragile, and bigger. The benefits for some people huge storage capacity are worth it, but not for me. My wife even wants to get a portable little player, which means I can actually probably end up with one :).
 
The karma is actually REALLY small. suprisingly small even. I saw one in the store a few days ago and had to check and triple check that it was the 20G HD player. (It seemed smaller than the footprint of the fujitsu drive).

The HD players all have built in LiIon batteries, so that's not a concern. I regularly jog with an RCA thompson 1" hard drive player and have no problems. Of course, I haven't dropped it so I don't know how well it stands up to that sort of punishment.

As for flash players & Ogg, I would guess your best bet would be if iRiver came out with one. As far as I know, only the ARM architecture currently supports Ogg, and not many people (iRiver being one of the few exceptions) still use ARM chips in their flash players.
 
Yes I realized the karma was small, it is 5.5 oz, and 2.7x3x1.1 inches or something for anyone else thinking about these nifty toys.

Russ I was just thinking that to spin the HD would take more power so shorter battery life, but 15 hours is plenty of battery time.

RussSchultz said:
As for flash players & Ogg, I would guess your best bet would be if iRiver came out with one. As far as I know, only the ARM architecture currently supports Ogg, and not many people (iRiver being one of the few exceptions) still use ARM chips in their flash players.
Click to expand...

This confused me, but I am a clueless consumer in this arena to be honest. HD players support ogg, so are you saying that only the ARM architecture can support ogg and flash? I mean is the way that HD players support ogg files not transferable?

Also it seems that it is implied that the ARM architecture is outdated (since you said only they *still* use it) so does that mean that older players could have played ogg files, and new ones will not be able to? Seems weird to take a step back like that, but as I said I am pretty clueless about this stuff.
 
Patrick if you notice I included iriver in my list of players, but I believe it is only their HD player that does support ogg, and not the flash player if I am wrong though I am happier for it.
 
Sorry, lets see if I can restate what I was trying to get across.

-Only ARM, that I know of, currently supports Ogg.
-Most HD players use chipsets that have an ARM core. There are a few exceptions: Archos didn't (maybe their current one does); the RIO Nitrus doesn't; a few no-name brands don't. Everybody else is powered by the ARM.
-Most flash players have moved away from the ARM core based chipsets. Not because of anything with the ARM, but because of other reasons related more to the chipset and architecture associated with those particular chipsets(cost, size, and battery life)

Ogg files should work fine on any player that plays them--just that there's very few current ARM based flash players. The iRiver one is one of the few I know of.
 
Russ thanks for the info, I really appreciate it.

I did check the iriver site fairly well and it is correct that only HD based players can play ogg files. Although awhile ago none played ogg files so it is a step in the right direction. I would think more would want to since it is royalty free, of course I also realize that it takes more processing power.
 
Sadly, the Ogg community isn't set up to really "sell" Ogg.

The default implementation is GPLd (or LGPLd to be more precise). Many companies are lawsuit adverse and IP secretive and don't want the viralness of GPL anywhere near their products. There are some legal issues (real or percieved) to licensing other commercial codecs when GPL/LGPL is involved.

Plus, none of the Ogg developers are "embedded" savy, from what I can tell. An implementation that takes 100 mhz pentium isn't acceptable on a battery powered device. Ogg just recently released an integer based implementation, but its still not a terribly good performer from what I've heard. It needs to run in under 20 MIPs on an ARM to be a viable product. I don't know if that's happened yet.
 
You know russ, with the extremely low powered chips that are coming out (like VIA, and transmetas new one) @ around 1ghz, I bet they oculd make an equivalent to pentium 100mhz that would take almost no power, of course it would be rather expensive I guess, but you see what I mean.
 
I'd love a decent OGG player walkman, and I've been keeping an eye out for a good one for a while. Given the better quality of OGG and the lack of licencing costs, it seems silly that hardly anyone bothers to use it in their products.

As far as hard drives go, most of these portable drives are pretty robust, and designed to take high gee shocks. Most of the time they are parked and powered down. The drives are mostly dormant and then just power up periodically to fill up a memory cache. That's how you get such good battery life even with a hard drive - most of the time it's just a little ram and the actual playback that is powered.
 
BZB that is good to hear, I was wondering about the battery thing, and also thought that a spinning harddrive would be liable to get scratched, now it makes a lot more sense how it is possible for them to be decently robust.
BTW rio's player has only a 90day warranty bleh... I want a year :).
 
RussSchultz said:
Sadly, the Ogg community isn't set up to really "sell" Ogg.

The default implementation is GPLd (or LGPLd to be more precise). Many companies are lawsuit adverse and IP secretive and don't want the viralness of GPL anywhere near their products. There are some legal issues (real or percieved) to licensing other commercial codecs when GPL/LGPL is involved.

Plus, none of the Ogg developers are "embedded" savy, from what I can tell. An implementation that takes 100 mhz pentium isn't acceptable on a battery powered device. Ogg just recently released an integer based implementation, but its still not a terribly good performer from what I've heard. It needs to run in under 20 MIPs on an ARM to be a viable product. I don't know if that's happened yet.
Click to expand...

This is infact, mostly false. There is an ogg vorbis integer-only docoder named "tremor" which is released under a BSD style license. Given that your biggest complaint seemd to be the "viral" nature of the gpl as you put it, you should have no problems with the BSD license.

Even if the code was released under something like the LGPL, you could still use it in commercial projects without needing to opensource your OS software. (This is the reason why many libraries use LGPL instead of GPL). Here is a link to the code:

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/index.html

And here is a link to more information about portable music players capable of playing Oggs:

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

Nite_Hawk
 
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