I saw this device on
http://www.lik-sang.com/ and decided that for $25US it was too good to pass up.
Direct link to buy hereThey shipped internationally (from Hong Kong) and I got it in a week. I purchased a cardreader and 2GB Compact flash card ($65) off Newegg.
Hey if the player didn't work out, i would have an upgradable usb drive
Movie files are converted from standard format
s to *.gbm/*.gbs.
The software is pretty easy - drag drop, settings per file. Click convert, and go to bed, copy your files onto your flash card in the morning. And you have a decent media device.
Compression ranges - mostly depending on the sound - this is an ARM 33MHz cpu - not a beast by any means. Sound is expensive, and this is probably the device's shortcoming. At 1:32 compression ratio, it's not bad - not for some shows, southpark for instance was incredible. Some shows need the extra sound quality - e.g. anything with tons of explosions, a big musical score and so on.
1:32 sound compression, best video - a titbit more than 10MB a minute. Not bad for a movie - even a long one.
1:16 sound compression, best video - 30 MB a minute - no i don't get the triple size, given the double ratio...
Thinking about sizes? That's 3.6GB for a 2 hour movie on best quality, and 1.2GB for a movie on medium quality sound. It varys a little, and you can tweak per movie if you have the time - some just don't need that high a sound quality, which
really makes it a worthwhile endevour - keeping a harddrive full of GBA movies doesn't sound that bad.
Time to convert - appears to be very dependant on core speed - little difference from my athlon xp 2.3GHz @400fsb and my 2.5GHz 3400+ (hammer). A little more that 2 seconds to encode a second of video on either system.
Quality - GIGO = garbage in, garbage out. That and you have to keep in mind, you get to tweak the quality and gain on sound. Video looked great - on a screen that small, you miss out on extreme details, but you don't see minor blemishes.
Naunces - Maximum size of a converted file is 512MB (gbm and gbs files) so if you're making high quality video conversions, you'll have multiple files to play.
Extras - can view txt and ebooks. Can view bitmaps, and i'm still downloading a load of gba and nes roms to test those.
This is a GREAT device. It's low priced, easy to use the software. The dvd conversion software isn't very good at ripping some of the more protected (or even crappily protected) dvd's, so i'd strongly recommend
Fairuse Wizard. It gives you a good amount of leeway in converting - quality, size of file, res. Free ripping to 700MB, and has an auto option which is great for when i have too many blockbuster DVD's to watch. Back it up, see it later.
