Please consider adding support for the Creative Zen

[wenglish]

There doesn't appear to be a forum for product suggestions, and my request here didn't get a response from Slysoft, so I thought I'd try again in a fresh post.

We have two Creative Zens in the family. One has room for several videos (full-length DVD rips) in the main memory, but the other one does not have enough room and so I want to put DVD rips on an SD card.

I had noted in the other thread that there were A/V synch issues with the DivX codec, and that the Zen does not support the same profile of MPEG4 that CloneDVD Mobile supports, so neither of those is an option for me.

The result is that I use CloneDVD Mobile to produce a Windows Media Video 8 file (fourCC code WMV2), but Windows Media Player 10 still needs to spend a long time converting the video.

This is all fine (although time consuming) when using WMP to synch the video to the Zen with enough free space on it, but for the other Zen when I copy one of the WMV files (generated by CloneDVD Mobile) to a card and try to play the video on the Zen, it tells me the format isn't supported (which makes sense given that WMP requires a conversion when synching).

The ideal would be for Slysoft to include settings in Devices.ini that are specific for the Creative Zen and are known to work without A/V synch issues (I don't care what codec, so long as it works). If that's not possible, would you consider updating the encoder so that it produces fourCC WMV3, which I believe will fix this problem? It would save people a lot of grief I think.

I pulled one of the converted clips off the Zen to my PC (not via WMP) and ran it through GSpot. Here are what I believe to be the pertinent details of the codec that WMP10 thinks is required by the Zen (and which plays properly on the Zen):

Audio codec - WMA v2 64 Kbps
FourCC - WMV3
Video codec - WMP v9 (VC-1 Simple/Main)​

BTW I'd like to congratulate the Marketing department at Creative for naming a new product (Creative Zen) with the same name as a bazillion other products (Zen Micro, Zen Stone, Zen Vision, Zen This, Zen That, Zen The Other). It makes it really hard to search for information relevant to the new player.

Thanks ... Mike

 

[GreenHead]

Isn't the zen on there. This is what I use on my M.

 

[wenglish]

Isn't the zen on there. This is what I use on my M.

The Zen Vision is on there, but that profile has significant A/V synch issues when played back on the Zen (non-Vision).

Mike

 

[Scarpad]

Well no that's a different player, the Zen is the newest Flash player, it has a bit different requirements. Wenglish I have a 16gb Zen and I use the Generic Divx Profile and it works fine for the Zen, just set it at 320x240, I set about a 630 Bitrate and use 2 pass Encoding which eliminates blockiness, and the encodes look fine and are in Sync audio wise. The Zen is a nice little player, with 16gb on board I bought a 16gb SD Card and to have 32 gig in a device so small, it's can hold alot.

 

[wenglish]

Well no that's a different player, the Zen is the newest Flash player, it has a bit different requirements. Wenglish I have a 16gb Zen and I use the Generic Divx Profile and it works fine for the Zen, just set it at 320x240, I set about a 630 Bitrate and use 2 pass Encoding which eliminates blockiness, and the encodes look fine and are in Sync audio wise. The Zen is a nice little player, with 16gb on board I bought a 16gb SD Card and to have 32 gig in a device so small, it's can hold alot.

Hmm, and you're not seeing A/V synch problems even towards the end of a full-length movie? Maybe I should try again, although the settings you quote seem about the same as what I was trying (definitely 2-pass, not sure about the bit-rate although I believe I used the default). Also I was setting the zoom to full (on letter box movies).

But regardless of the above (hint hint Slysoft) - updating CloneDVD Mobile to use the WMV3 (=WMV9) codec would be a very good thing to do, since the WMV2 codec is really old.

Any comments from Slysoft on this?

Edit: Interestingly, when I feed the WMV file created by CloneDVD Mobile into Windows Media Encoder or Windows Movie Maker (in an attempt to do the conversion prior to Windows Media Player doing it at sync time), both programs choke. There's something about the WMV2 file that they don't like (which is another reason to bring CloneDVD Mobile's support of WMV into the 21st century, IMNSHO).

Thanks ... Mike

 

[wenglish]

Since Slysoft haven't responded to this thread, I have followed Webslinger's advice and contacted them about this.

Mike

 

[wenglish]

I got a quick response back from Slysoft. They won't be implementing this because it costs money to license WMV.

Mike

 

[jasondunn]

I'll second the vote for supporting the Creative Zen as well...