My big Christmas present this year was a Creative Zen Vision W. The Vision W is a portable media player, basically a fancy mp3 player, with a 4.3″ 16:9 wide format screen. The device plays music & video files, Audible books, displays picture slide shows, has a built in FM radio, and offers voice recording capabilities.
I already have a portable music device, my Dell DJ 20, and this new device did not replace that. In fact, I really don’t have much of any music on the Vision W right now. The 30 GB on the new device is not quite filled yet, but will be soon, with videos, podcasts, vidcasts, Audible content and pictures.
I wanted the Zen primarily as a digital picture frame for pictures of Iain. I also wanted to be able to show off some of the video content I have of my son. A third goal was to get all the Audible and podcast content off of my Dell so that I could fill it with music. So how is it all working?
Great! I had a few hiccups the first couple days connecting the device to my desktop PC. Apparently, this is a pretty common problem. A scan of the forums at Creative pointed me to a file called fixup.bat which another member had put together. Ran the fixup, rebooted the PC, and everything started working.
My current setup is somewhat confusing, but it seems to be working. As long as it continues to work I will stick with it. I have all of my video netcast or vidcast, content downloaded through the Creative Zencast program. Zencast is a tool and associated website for gathering syndicated content from the net that comes with the Creative device. I download all the video files, via Zencast, to the video folder that the Creative Synch tool uses. FeedDemon is my primary RSS tool, and the Feed Station accessory grabs podcasts from my feeds. I auto download attachments to my favorite audio podcasts with Feed Station and put them in the Audio synch folder. I use the two programs to keep my audio and video content synching separately. Anyone know of a podcatching tool that will keep Audio and video content separate? I manually copy pictures or create picture slide shows using the Creative tools. Each night before bed I start the device synching and its ready to go in the AM.
The synch process includes a conversion to the formats that the device likes. It will convert most video file formats, and also reduces the size of the pictures on the device for display and space purposes. It is a processor intensive job though, and best to run it at night.
I decided to purchase a video from the relatively new Amazon Unbox Video service. Unbox sells digital movies and television shows for either rental or ownership. It requires the use of the Unbox software, which worked very well in my tests. Each purchase comes with a license for 2 PC’s and 2 Portable devices. The EULA is fairly restrictive, I don’t think I would make a habit of purchasing video from them, but the copy of the movie Dune I bought looks nice both on the Zen and on my PC. Audible is a service I have used for years, signed up for the Gold membership to go with the Zen, and that is working very well. I am getting a new audio system for my Scion xB, one with an accessory input, and plan to use the Zen for commute time audiobooking.
Overall, the video and sound quality on the Zen are really top notch. The features of the device, and the user interface are all well done. My only real complaints were the trouble getting started, and the lack of some sort of scroll wheel. Those minor things aside I could not be happier with this years Christmas swag.
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