::A Geek in Korea::

A little more than a week ago, I got a Cowon D2 portable media player. I’ve been playing with it every day since then and bring it everywhere compulsively, so I think I’ve used it enough to give a little background about my new toy. I’ve been using the D2 primarily as a personal video and audio player, and I think it excels at both functions. The biggest hurdle I faced when using the player is getting videos in the proper format for viewing.

Video Conversion Software

Right now, my current routine is to grab a video, whether from a DVD, or YouTube, and convert it for use on the player. Because the player’s screen has a maximum resolution of 320×240 with 30 frames per second, things need to be scaled back to fit the player window. I’ve found a few tools that work, some that don’t. Super, the video converter I recommended initially chokes and crashes on large files too consistently to be useful. It might be the overwhelming number of options that have prevented me from figuring out how to use it, but since I couldn’t get it working on the files I needed, I ditched it and went looking for alternatives.

The first alternative I used, Iriverter, worked easily. Sadly, it was made for a competitor’s product, the Iriver Clix. While the D2 can play files that work on the Clix, the D2 actually can support double the frame rate (15 with the Clix vs. 30 with the D2). When watching video, the more frames, the smoother the picture. Dropping half the frames of a video saves space, but it causes the video to look a little jerky. It might work better for animation compared to, say, live action dramas, but why settle? While the Iriverter wins for being simple to use, it doesn’t do the job I want. When a new model of the Clix comes out that supports a higher frame rate, and there is additional support, I might fire it back up.

A student of mine that also owns a D2 recommended this site: Cowon D2 Community. This site has a freeware conversion program made specifically for the D2. This is a good start. It installs Gspot, which is highly useful for figuring out what sort of files you have. Sadly, while the program has English menus, the help files are mostly Korean. I’ve dropped several files into the converter, and it’s spit out errors. While it’ll output files I want, the files it can handle for conversion are lacking.

The software included in the Cowon D2 package, JetAudio, doesn’t convert faster than 2x on the settings I tried. This means that most of the time, if I want to convert a lot of files, I could be half way finished with something by the time I could start watching it on the player. This doesn’t make any sense for me. While it can handle a wide variety of files (no .flv files!) it can’t save me very much time. Also, it’s a resource hog, and a program that loves to steal file associations. When I installed it initially, it wanted to play everything on my system, when I only intended it to be a workhorse file converter program. Boo.

Right now, the clear cut winner for conversion software for the D2 is GOM Encoder. GOM, makers of the incredible GOM Player (Seriously, it plays everything. It’s like VLC with a GOOD interface) have made a wonderful product for converting files for the D2. GOM Encoder is a time limited (Free till July) demo program. It requires a connection to the Internet, and "calls home" at start when you fire up the program. It’s not going to be a free program when it is finally fully released.

Right now it handles the files I most commonly stumble across except .flv files from YouTube or other flash based online players. The reason GOM Encoder is my favorite is that it does faster than real time encoding.I can convert a 30 minute show in about five minutes. Since you can queue up an entire folder and forget about it running in the background, this is the best and fastest way to get videos onto the player you can watch. It also has settings specifically for the D2, which means I don’t need to fiddle with check boxes and different profiles to test what looks best. I can tolerate the small 5 second watermark on the corner of my files for now. If the price of the license for the pay player contains the same or more features and keeps the simplicity of the current interface, I’m more than sold on this encoder. (Please add .flv support GOM!)

Features

The player itself is tiny, flash based, and does everything I want. The touch screen interface means that you don’t have to remember a sequence of complicated button sequences to navigate the player. It’s also allowed the features of the player to be expanded greatly beyond it’s initial capabilities. Today I installed the latest firmware, which adds Dictionary support! I’ve got a portable Korean->English, English-> Korean dictionary in my PMP! Best of all, it was released with the firmware with no extra charge! You can use the touch screen as a keyboard to enter words and look them up. There is even an optional pronunciation feature for English words (I didn’t install it). It’s really pretty cool to see it extended in such a surprising way.

The player handles bookmarking and on the fly playlists. If you are in the middle of a file when class starts, you can either shut down the player and have it resume at the point where you stopped, or set a bookmark to go back to where you were, depending on how you set it up. The player supports FLAC, OGG, APE, AAC,  WMA and MP3 formats. It is digital rights management compliant (Plays For Sure, WMA10) so if I ever had the crazy desire to order something off of Melon I could (but totally never will. Fuck DRM.) As long as open source license free files like OGG are supported, I can feel good about owning a player that supports optional DRM files too.

The player supports DMB service in Korea, which means I could watch digital television around town. The DMB service isn’t fully fleshed out in Daejeon compared to Seoul, so while this might be a useful feature in the future, right now I’m not finding much of a use for it. The FM radio feature is a nice touch, and recording broadcasts you hear is great, but Korean radio is the antithesis of quality programming. I’d rather just jab pencils in my ears than listen to it.

Navigation and Screen

The navigation and player interface is slick. The touch screen makes finding files and moving between menus intuitive and natural. I like it a lot more than any other player I’ve ever tried. I got a neckband so I don’t need to always hold it when I walk around with my dog. Outside in direct sunlight it’s nearly impossible to see the screen.

It’s not like the Nintendo DS lite, where outside viewing of the screen is more than possible. You need to either be inside, or at least in shade to make out the player’s screen.This was a bit of a disappointment after the bring Nintendo DS light screen, but watching a video on the bus, in a taxi, or at work is still awesome.

The colors look good on videos. It’s a small hand held player with wide screen dimensions, perfect for watching videos on the go. I’ve watched several hours of video in the course of a day. I’d say taking a break between files would be a good idea to reduce eyestrain. However, firing up a video to watch in the back of a taxi or on the bus totally makes the commute time disappear. I’ve reached my apartment and realized I didn’t remember how I got home because I was so absorbed in what I was watching.

Battery Life and External Memory

Battery life is fantastic. It’s rated for 52 hours of MP3 playback, 10 hours for video. I don’t run my player constantly, but I believe it. I’ve been using the player for a few days and I’ve never worn the battery down past the first "bar". Of course, the player can draw power from an AC outlet as well as use a USB port for charging it’s battery. Since I’ll plug in the D2 to move files around, by the time I remember to take it to go to work the battery is already charged and ready to go. I’ve watched four hours of video in a single day when I first got it and listened to music all day between charges and never had to worry about the battery. It’s a total relief to me, because my wife’s Iriver H10 needs a charge once or twice a week.

I’m not running files on a SD card in the expansion port at the moment, which I’ve heard draws more power for reading and accessing the card. While this might mean that battery life varies on the location of the file in  the player, either on board flash memory or external memory card, it’s still a very minor concern. The newest firmware introduces support for SD HC (High Capacity?) cards that can go up to 8 Gigs or higher. That’s a lot of files. I’ve heard that inclusion of Id3 tag support has radically increased boot times as the player tries to index its database of files on each startup. This seems like an annoying side effect for someone that would want to use the player primarily as a music device. I haven’t run into this problem yet.

Overall

I’m very impressed with the quality of the player. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to watch files to go that doesn’t want a hard drive based player. It’s key features are touch screen navigation, interesting features, long battery life, video and audio codec support, and external memory expansion. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for player they want to use for watching videos where archiving a large number of videos isn’t the highest priority. It’s perfect for commutes, or people that can convert a few files at home and then watch them on the go. Also, with the inclusion of the Dictionary, I’d recommend it to Korean students that want to condense the number of electronics in their bags, or need an excuse to get a cool Mp3 player.