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Mobile media devices for this holiday season?

© Anne Kellerman

Several new mobile multimedia devices present tempting holiday gifts for friends and family. These devices allow you to not only carry your favorite MP3 tunes like Apple's iPOD but in addition these devices purport to show video, photographs, and some even claim videos, movies and TV shows. These are real multimedia mobile devices that present exciting prospects for those of us working in multimedia for the last decade. As educators, we can envision supplying our students with snippets of instructional video that they could carry with them. We could supply our lectures in audio form or even videos of our lectures. We could provide pictures for support of teaching biology and geography. Is this realistic this year with these devices or are these devices solely novelties or solely for pioneers or early adopters?

Earlier this year, I and a colleague ordered the ZVUE 200 MP4 Video and MP3 Music player for $144.50 from http://www.ComputerGeeks.com. Its specification said the package included "MP4 video software." I bought the device for viewing MPEG-4 compressed video on the go with the idea that I could create little lectures in MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is a standard video compression, easy to use so I thought.

What I got (in addition to what appeared to be the non-MP4, $98 version of the ZVUE) were an SD memory card and a blue sheet titled "Read This First" that said "Your ZVUE includes a 15-day free trial version of Dr. DivX, a special video processing program that will allow you to reformat MPEG-4, AVI, and other video files to fit onto the handheld-sized screen. You will find Dr. DivX on the "Zflicks" SD card enclosed with your ZVUE." I seem to have paid $46 for a free trial version of software I could have downloaded from the Web.

The ZVUE's "Quick Start" page said "Note: ZVUE will not play videos transferred from your computer." That seemed to be correct because, when we tried the software and prepared video, the ZVUE gave the message "Unsupported format or resolution. Please visit zvue.com for details on supported formats." That Web site merely said to stay tuned for later announcements on viewing MPEG-4 videos. The Dr. DivX software had lots of choices and parameters and the documentation and Web site gave me no idea which ones to use or whether my Adobe Premiere can prepare equivalent video for playing on the ZVUE.

I didn't know whether I was madder about paying $46 for advertised software that turned out to be only a free trial version or about using the software to produce only an unsupported format. If I needed to pay an additional $100 to DivX to get what ZVUE advertised and if I can not prepare video that will play on the ZVUE, I would have to cancel the card charge and send the ZVUE back. As it turned out, ZVUE did intend to give me rights to use a DivX encoder but neglected to tell me about it without a few mad phone calls. Once we got every thing working which did require several days of experimentation and phone calls, we did agree that there was promise here. However, the promise is not now for other than pioneers or early adopters.

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