Jul
17
Hacking my Zune before I get it
Filed Under Uncategorized
Thanks to my double crossing friend I’ll be getting a Zune 8gb (no idea what colour) as part of a marketing program from a local company called Matchstick. The gist is that they give me a free Zune so long as I talk about it. Truth be told, I’m quite amped already. As a long-standing Zen 30gb user (in lovely green) I’ve never had much urge to swing over to the iPod side of the fence.
When it arrives it’ll already be a very feature rich player. The Zune 2 models (4gb/8gb/80gb) all share the exact same OS and screen resolution (320×240, though, the flash model screens are smaller, regardless of the matching resolution).
A couple of things were niggling at my shins, though.
One of the main reason I’ve loved my Zen 30gb for so long has been its ability to play Divx/Xvid files without any conversion. Drag and drop and play. The Zune and its software, however, doesn’t play nice with Divx file formats (though MPEG4 is stated as playable… those formats are interchanged so often that I can’t tell if they are the same or not, similar to Divx and Xvid). If I were going to buy a Zune with cash out of pocket I’d have done a lot of research before buying to make sure I could use it as I intend to, not as Microsoft intends me to. This means I wanna watch mah vide0z.
Also, no official Last.FM scrobbling support. I don’t really care too much about it, but on occasion I like to see what my latest recommendations are, and considering my wife plays most of the music at home (she’s not a fan of Slipknot or Ladytron, what can I say?) scrobbling on the go would be ideal.
There’s always a way to get what you want.
There seems to be a way around both of the cliffs- YIPPEE! First, other file formats (including avi, which hopefully means Divx files within AVI containers) can be supported with relatively little difficulty. Divx support seems to be up in the air, and it will most likely require a conversion but what they hey, worth trying. Otherwise I can try the software I installed on my wife’s computer to convert Divx files for her Zen 4gb (only the big HD based ones play Divx). Not ideal, but I might not be using this much for video considering it’ll only have 8gb of space.
For scrobbling people are recommending I use Zenses. The name is a definte tip-off; it also works with my good old Zen 30gb by the look of it! Would be very cool if, when plugging in either player to the computer, it could scrobble all the tracks I played. I tend to listen by artist so if it scrobbles tracks I skip over it shouldn’t matter too much.
So, yay! Once it arrives I’m gonna have to try this thing out with a run. I’ve never brought the Zen on a run due to its size and also fear for mucking up the hard drive. Though, I have dropped it numerous times on concrete (it has plainly visible battle scars) but it still mostly works fine, aside from t he off-button making it skip a track instead of, well, turning off.
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One Response to “Hacking my Zune before I get it”
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zune is terrible. i can transfer no video files to it unless they are BOUGHT from the market place or i use a program to convert the file to be a zune file but i still haven’t been able to add it to my zune!
every time i delete my songs from my computer, since my computer has low storage capacity. it WANTS to erase them from my zune, a relatively small problem compared to the first paragraph.
you CAN NOT drag and drop files into the zune using the new software, even if you do hack it.
A terrible purchase but if your getting it for free, this beer is for you.