Spaced Out ::

I’m the proud owner of a new Sandisk Sansa View, an mp4 player in the style of an Apple Nano, but without the Apple baggage that goes with it (and some might say, without the style). The specs target most of the things I was after: mp3 playback, mp4 playback, long battery life (~35 hours), microSD expansion, FM radio and audio recording. There are a range of memory sizes up to 32Gb, but with microSD expansion its more flexible; I plumped for the 16Gb version. The firmware hasn’t been updated for over a year now and the player is being discounted, so it looks like it’s being replaced.

Overall the View is a good player, albeit with a few minor niggles the primary one being that it is quite picky about the mp4s it plays. It supposedly supports mp4, h264, xvid, wmv9 etc etc. None of my xvids would play and none of the trancoding I did with either ffmpeg or mencoder worked. After much digging Any Video Converter worked flawlessly out of the box. It is actually only a front-end for ffmpeg and mencoder, however it does some extra muxing which I can only assume generates a more “compliant” mp4. Anyway, the result is good and the playback excellent.

The other “quirk” is really a feature. The View can operate in either MTP or MSC modes. The former is dedicated for transferring media files, but requires at least WMP10 to be installed on Windows. The latter shows the device as a ordinary hard disk drive and allows storage of any files. Both can be used with Windows Explorer to manually transfer files. With the View, using MTP automatically updates the internal media files database which speeds start-up considerably particularly with large numbers of files. When there is a microSD card installed this is automatically scanned at startup-to check for any changes.

A couple of nice final points: the View can record from FM radio and (with the appropriate cable) can output to a TV. The latter means it can operate as a simple media player which could be useful.