Gadget Review (an article written for the Bangkok Post):The I-River Pulls out the Stops
By Tom Riddle
The iRiver H340 Mp3 music player
is now available in Bangkok and it rocks. Not only does it rock with 40 gigs of storage space, it also talks with a FM radio, records in the MP3 format with a built in or external mic, displays text, shows pictures, and it plays movies. It fits into a shirt pocket as well. I am not making this up.
Unlike its nearest rival, the I-pod, the iRiver is not tied to any proprietary format. What that means to people like you and me is that when we visit our friends we can connect to their
Windows XP computer via a USB port and, without installing any special software, begin uploading and downloading movies, songs, programs, and text documents just like we would do with any other external hard drive. I am not making this up either.The display screen is only about 40mm by 32mm but surprisingly that's big enough to enjoy most feature-length movies even though you probably aren’t going to invite anyone other than a very close friend to watch movies with you. Nevertheless I’ve found that long bus rides zoom by while watching music videos or even feature-length movies on the iRiver H340.
So how do you get your movies into the iRriver? Easily and at no extra cost. It’s a matter of downloading some software, inserting your VCD disc, and telling the computer to “Save as AVI .” The encoding is about 4X, so you can do the encoding while you’re having breakfast.
The rest of this article explains the details. You can find links to the programs mentioned here and a iRiver movie on my home page, Thomasriddle.net, or you can do a search and find the programs yourself.
Begin by downloading three pieces of software—a codec for sound, a codec for video, and the actual encoding program.
For sound, the mp3 codec from Radium will work. To install the codec you’ll need to execute (double click) on a file called setupl3c.exe. It will be in the "RadiumMp3Codec" zipped file. Easy.
For video, the Xvid codec will do nicely.
The encoder is VirtualDub. I’ve used this program for the last four years--it's one of the great freebies of the net and useful for many kinds of movie editing.
To run VirtualDub, you just unpack the files and click the EXE file. This is green software, so it doesn’t install-- it just runs and in a tiny amount of disk space at that.To configure VirtualDub to turn VCD files (252 by 288 pixels at 25 frames per second) to I-river AVI files (220 by 176 at 10 frames per second) you can practice your concentration skills by following the myriad steps outlined at http://www.geocities.com/andrewjmelville/vd/vd2.html
Or you can download the file called “h340-processing_settings.vcf“ from my home page.
Once you have the processing settings file on your hard disk, run Virtual Dub, click FILE, Load Processing Settings, and load the processing settings.
Now comes the fun part, Click FILE, Open video file. (You don’t have to move the file from the VCD first and sorry, this won't work with DVDs.) After it loads, Click File, Save as AVI. Save that file to your iRiver and enjoy. You play movies the same way you play songs.
You'll know when you have the processing settings loaded correctly when you see the window on the right proportionally smaller than the window on the left.
PS I couldn't have done this without Andrew Mel's "Rough and Ready Guide to using VirtualDub to
Convert Videos for the iRiver H320 and H340 players " which can be found at, http://www.geocities.com/andrewjmelville/vd/vd2.html. Andrew is cool.Just for fun, here is one of my own movies that you're welcome to download and run on your iRiver.
Traffic Ballet gets more downloads than all of my other movies combined, in the "Movies" of my home page. The movie is 4 megabytes and exactly one minute long.
ƒ
