Operational Notes

 

You've been hearing me mention some of the features of this device, but now its time to be a bit more specific. This device handles MP3 audio, WMA audio, music video output, jpg/bmp/gif files, movie file output, it works as a voice recorder and playback device and also has an optional FM radio tuner as well. We're talking about a fully featured little gadget in one convenient package!

 

The Video MP3 400 comes in sizes of 258MB, 512MB and 1GB. Our test model is the 1GB version for your reference. This gives a good deal of room for music, videos, voice messages to yourself or whatever. You can even use it as a file storage medium since the device is picked up as a normal flash media device when you hook up the USB cable.

 

For maximum compatibility with all Windows operating systems, the player uses a FAT16 file system. To keep the device in its normal operating state, I did not experiment with using different file systems, so user beware that this may or may not work for you.

 

With regards to sound quality, I found the output to be very satisfactory. This is a very subjective area to cover in a review, but I played both rock music and classical and found the sound to be very good. There isn't much in the line of bass response, but this is more a reflection on the earpieces than the player. To verify this I plugged in the player to a set of 2.1 stereo speakers and the tones were excellent.

 

I mentioned before that the Video MP3 400 has a 65,000 color OLED display that can accommodate video files. While the format is proprietary, the conversion utility comes with the player on the included disk. Here is how simple the conversion process is...

 

 

Simply choose a video file, make sure the output location is to your liking and hit the green button with the two diagonal arrows. Go have a cup of coffee and it'll be ready for you in about 15 minutes for a full length ripped movie.

 

I'm not generally fond of proprietary formats, but this one is simple to use and there seem to be no limits on what it can convert over for you. As an example, I used a pair of movie files I ripped from disk (and yes, I own both of the movies) to try out the device. One was a DivX rip and the other an XviD format. Both were readily converted at a much smaller file size than the original.

 

 

The movie Cursed was done in XviD and the Spiderman movie was done in DivX. The compression ended up producing a file with a 74% reduction for the DivX format and a 79% reduction in file size for the XviD. On a 1GB player like the one tested, this means you can have upwards of four complete movies. Or you can put a mixture of movies and music files on the player and use the function joystick to maneuver your way through the data. Overall a very flexible little toy.

 

As far as picture quality is concerned, it is exactly what you would expect for a small display. The screen produces a small but very clear image. I attempted to capture the output but the quality of the digital photo was so poor in comparison to the actual image quality that it would have been an injustice in even showing it. Granted, you won't be able to read the scrolling credits in your favorite movie, but the quality is more than ample to let you keep up with the action with no problems.