Considering a D2, but have questions..

[rhondaweasley]

Well as my Sansa Clip disappeared and my Zune80 is acting up, I'm considering a new player instead of more of the old.


Firstly,

I hear the D2 is a pretty good audiobook player and you can use bookmarks on it (a required feature for good audiobook playback) but I was wondering, does it have a seperate audiobook folder or will my audiobooks (ripped from CDs) be bundled in the music. One thing I liked about the Sansa for audiobooks vs. the Zune was that they were drag/dropped into thier own folder via windows and then seperated automatically by the player into their own little space.

Secondly,

Video, almost all of my videos are in window media video format and I have a HUGE libary of videos. One thing I like about the D2 is that like my Zune there's a TV out cable for easy TV viewing. But would I have to reconvert (and re-tag) my videos before being able to play them on the D2?

Looking forward to any helpful answers before I dive in and purchase one of these little players. Thanks ahead of time.

[CrowdAds]

[snowcrash]

Originally Posted by rhondaweasley

Well as my Sansa Clip disappeared and my Zune80 is acting up, I'm considering a new player instead of more of the old.


Firstly,

I hear the D2 is a pretty good audiobook player and you can use bookmarks on it (a required feature for good audiobook playback) but I was wondering, does it have a seperate audiobook folder or will my audiobooks (ripped from CDs) be bundled in the music. One thing I liked about the Sansa for audiobooks vs. the Zune was that they were drag/dropped into thier own folder via windows and then seperated automatically by the player into their own little space.

Secondly,

Video, almost all of my videos are in window media video format and I have a HUGE libary of videos. One thing I like about the D2 is that like my Zune there's a TV out cable for easy TV viewing. But would I have to reconvert (and re-tag) my videos before being able to play them on the D2?

Looking forward to any helpful answers before I dive in and purchase one of these little players. Thanks ahead of time.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and TTC lectures on my D2. There is no separate audiobook folder. You simply create one and drag and drop your listening material into different subfolders. You can easily bookmark. Also, the D2 has a nice memory feature where it restarts in the same position where you shut down. If you plan on cotinuing with the audio book and not switch to some music on startup, you don't need to bookmark.

It plays WMA files so you wouldn't need to convert them.

[iaudio]

rhondaweasly, I think you might have to convert the videos to 320*240 before you get to play them on the D2.

[Flamin_Spirit]

Videos must be in AVI format at 320x240 resolution or they will not play on the D2/D2+ A good utility I use to transcode video is called SUPER

[dfkt]

SUPER won't work for the D2 when you use it as a Mencoder frontend, only FFDShow transcodes work on the D2. The D2 uses a non-standard way of interleaving AVIs, and transcoding with Mencoder will have sync issues between audio and video. My favorite tool for converting videos back when I had the D2 was MaxSt's D2video, it was extremely fast and worked flawlessly.

The D2 is a huge annoyance/hassle as a video player, and very much sub-par by today's standards. TV-out is only 320x240 as well, so it will look like garbage on any medium-large-ish TV.

[barryem]

I've been using the Cowon converter that comes with Cowon Media Center to convert videos for the D2 and for my Zens and my several other video players. It's fast and works well.

However, the new Gom Encoder (they just released the commercial version) so far seems to do everything the Cowon converter does and it's about 4 times as fast on my dual core system. Actually it's more than twice as fast but it uses both cores and the Cowon converter only used one so effectively it's over 4 times as fast.

I converted a whole season of Cheers last night (25 shows) in about 1.5 hours and my computer isn't really a fast one. The previous season that I converted took several hours.

It also lets you control several things like contrast, brightness, saturation and hue and it lets you control volume.

It also has presets for several of my players and it only took a few minutes to make new ones for the ones it didn't have.

It's commercial so it isn't free. I think it was $35 but I'm not sure now. I think it's going to replace the Cowon program for me. I'll know better after I've used it more.

Barry