discount mp3 player

Recently (a month ago) I ordered interest for the sake of a Chinese player on Ebay. The seller guaranteed 8GB memory, support for audio, video, pictures, radio, voice recorder and even games with the phone book. This player cost me just $ 15 . Naturally, I understand that for such money you will not get anything normal, but I still wanted to know what was inside.
Yesterday I came. As the saying goes, “Do not feed Geek with bread, give it a new piece of iron to pick it up”, I began to study this player along and across.
In this topic I want to show the main advantages and disadvantages of this player.

First about the packaging. The usual bag came in, with a dimpled polyethylene on the inside of the bag. From the set: the player itself, charging, 2.5mm headphones, USB <-> miniUSB wire, English manual and disk . As a gift, there was also an adapter from 2.5mm to 3.5mm and a silicone case that perfectly matches the design of the player. The player came discharged, so you need some time to charge.
The usb wire broke the next day. Headphones are also of dull quality. The adapter is slightly off. But this is not the point, because the main thing: the player.

Appearance

Dimensions of the player 72mm x 40mm x 9mm. Made of plastic. The assembly is normal, without backlash and gaps. If it falls, it will withstand the blow. On the front of the 1.8 "display with support for 65k colors and 5 buttons: Menu, Play / Stop, Vol, Prev and Next . Resolution: 128x160 . The quality of the display is the same as for the first colored phones. There is a miniUSB connector on the left, and 2.5mm headphone jack. On the back cover there are holes for the microphone and the Reset button (more than once saved), and a shiny sticker with the inscription 8Gb. There is a film on the screen, although it's better without it.
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Interface

The interface is hardly intuitive. I spent some time while I understood how to listen to music. It turns out that to go to the right menu you need to press not the Play / Stop button, but the Menu, and not just press it, but hold it down for half a second. And if you hold for longer - you can go to the global menu. But now I'm used to it.
PS Photos of the display are made on the camera. In reality, the display looks a bit better.

Music

Supports MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG . If Russian is selected (as the system language), displays ID3 tags in CP1251 encoding. Utf8 tags do not understand. It also does not understand Cyrillic in file names. There is an equalizer in the preset settings. It has different playback modes. Playlists can not play.

Video

The video reads in its own AMV format. For linux there is a patch for ffmpeg that allows you to encode. I could not use it (it turned out on some source video files. I swore on an unknown audio track, although there is a standard ac3). Standard Windows Encoder does not work correctly. As a result of video with distortion, the sound is not synchronized with the video.
There is another add-on over ffmpeg. Called MPxConverter . Although the linux version did not work, the video recoded normally in Windows.
This video format has a low compression ratio, so one movie will take about 100-200 megabytes. Watching the video goes smoothly, video scrolling is also smooth. You can watch.

Other functions

Supports formats Jpg, Gif, Bmp . Supports large resolutions (I tried 1600x1200) image scales. Slide in the image does not support. Png does not support.

Writes to Wav (32kbps) and Act (8kbps) formats. Sensitivity, as for this type of player, is good. It is possible to listen to the recordings in the player itself.

Reads txt files. If Russian is chosen as system language, understands Cyrillic in CP1251 encoding. Cyrillic in the file names do not understand. I don’t know how convenient it is to read, but you can see small txt files.



Also, for solidity, they added three games (tetris, sokoban and snake) and a phone book.

The battery is Li-ion 3.7 at 250mAh. Enough for 5-6 hours of listening to music or 3-4 hours from movies.

Discrepancies with the description of the seller

• The first and most offensive: memory. As a rule, the declared amount of memory is 4 times the actual. Instead of 8gb, I ended up with 2gb. This method is called "hacked memory". Writing to such a memory is carried out without problems, but when reading it turns out abracadabra. In this regard, many reading problems. Therefore, it is better to fix it immediately using this guide ;
• The second deception concerns the USB2.0 mode. In fact, there is USB2.0 Full-speed, but not Hi-speed. As I understand it, this is USB1.1 mode, but with compatibility with version 2.0. The maximum read and write speed is 12 Mbps;
• AVI and WMV formats, as stated, are not supported;
• Multitasking is also not, you can not listen to music and read files.

What's inside?

Here is the most interesting. All fake players are based on Actions chipsets. These players are called S1MP3 . The microprocessor is 8-bit, the frequency depends on the specific player. My, judging by the datasheet, 48 MHz. These chips have a set of instructions that is compatible with the Z80 (remember the ZX Spectrum?).
This means that you can program for it. On some players, you can already run the actual written program. There are several fanatical people who even want to write their OS for these players, of course with blackjack and you-know-who. More details can be found here .
On my player, alas, so far I have not been able to try anything like that.

findings

If you take into account the cost of the player, you can forgive a few of its shortcomings. He can play music, supports common formats, and even watch a video (although I had some discomfort after watching a movie on such a creepy display). Also, if you're lucky (if you have the right SoC), it can become a platform for programming. Well, what geek will be against digging in an mp3 player for $ 15? Good luck!

PS If you set Chinese as the system language, the player will begin to understand the Cyrillic alphabet in file names in a wonderful way. Only a terrible font.