Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Among the other fine choices my family made for me (including scale model TBM Avenger, a book of panoramic photos of polar regions, aircraft movies, and old comedy movies, to name a few) I received a new media player.

This is the gp2x, which will be a fun hobby. If I were looking for a slick, trouble-free, tiny console with endless hard disk storage, I’d be looking in the wrong place. It’s pretty cool, but not quite “trouble free”. This device will be a bit of a hobby.

It made some interesting choices. The first was to be all open source. It’s a linux-based device for starters, and seems to stick to the common standards like USB ports and standard AA batteries. It even has a pretty familiar A/B/X/Y button layout with L1 and R1 buttons like on the game cube. I don’t play games, so it’s all the same to me, but the kids noticed some similarity. Also, its storage is entirely via the Secure Digital port. I happily have gotten two of them recently, each 1GB. I think I’ll watch for more/bigger ones. As is, thought, it’s enough for some video and audio.

It does some things really well. I find it to be a very good audio player and video player. It is also an ebook reader, though I’ve not tried that yet. The screen is large and bright, and I found it pretty comfortable for watching video. It’s really a pretty nice unit.

It handles OGG and MP3 very well, and has a variety of EQ presets. I can get whatever I want out of it musically, I think. I’ve a number of podcasts to catch up on, both talk radio and old-time radio comedies and . The one gig cards hold a lot of episodes. I’ve also been watching “Santa Clause Conquers the Martians” (a particularly bad Public Domain .avi file I have on hand) . This media player covers a lot of file formats, I’m not too worried about being able to get my media onto it.

There are only a couple of shortcomings. One is battery life. I sadly will only get about 10 hours of audio play (screen off, I assume) or else about 6 hours of video. If I use the USB cable to transfer files, I burn battery while transferring files. Luckily, I have a card reader/writer that is USB powered, so I can avoid some hassle. I will have to carry a few rechargables and a battery charger around with me, regardless. I don’t want to go burning through batteries all the time. But it will be sufficient for me to use on planes and trains, and I can use my laptop when I’m in a hotel room. There is also the option of an AC power supply. I can get around this problem.

Another issue is that it’s not as easy to install games on this thing as one might like. I’d like it to be like plugging in a game boy cartridge, but that’s now how it works. Installing requires some effort on my part, and games don’t install all the same. I hear that installing MAME on this device makes it more useful as a game platform. All of that doesn’t much matter, though, because I am not a game guy. I installed frozen bubble and it took me a while to learn the controls. I just don’t have the instinct for console games. Since I’m not so hot on gaming anyway, I may not mind this at all.

The main frustration I have is trying to get it to fast-forward a video file. I don’t want to watch the intro to Santa Conquers the Martians even one more time. I’ve had enough. I need to figure out how to use this thing better.

There is a longer and more detailed writeup at wikipedia’s GP2X page.

I found the fast-forward, it just didn’t work on the Plan Nine file. On other files it works just fine. You use the joystick by pressing left. A tap takes it a few seconds forward, but you can hold it to the left and get a progress bar at the top of the screen. When you think it’s far enough, release it, and the movie resumes from the forward point. It’s quite nice, when it works. I also installed a game or two, but games bore me pretty quickly. Now I need a 4GB SD card to plug in. I already got my rechargeable batteries, so that’s not the big worry anymore.