January 21st, 2008 by Jake Scaltreto
I've recently purchased a Creative Zen Vision W portable media player. Let me first state that my initial impressions are nothing but positive. For those unfamiliar with the W, think of it like an ipod on steroids (and yes, I still have my 3G ipod purchased in 2003, and yes, it still works). While it's significantly larger than an ipod, and hardly something I'd want to carry around in my pocket, I bought the W for it's video playback capability with audio playback being secondary.
The video playback couldn't be better. The screen is large, so watching a movie or tv show on it is quite enjoyable, and with a battery life of over 4 hours for video playback, I can use it through almost an entire Boston->San Francisco flight. The sound quality is superior to 3G ipod - it delivers a much richer audio experience. Additionally it comes with features such as voice recording and FM radio built in - which, while I haven't used it much, is certainly nice to have. The W does have some minor drawbacks or areas where I would like to see improvement.
Linux compatibility - Like many mass market devices, the W is designed to work on Windows. As a Linux user, I have gotten accustomed to throwing out driver/software CDs that come with hardware, and the W is no different. There is a ray of light, however. The W uses Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) to transfer data over USB. Thankfully, there are a few Linux applications that support this. The first is the feature-rich (read bloated) music player, Amarok, which can be used to transfer music, album art, etc. to and from the W with ease. Additionally, the minimalist Gnomad2 does a fine job of transferring music, video, and other data to and from the W. I've also heard that later versions of Rhythmbox support MTP, but I've yet to play with it myself. I would really like to see the player work like a portable hard drive with specific directories to copy music, video, pictures, etc. to. Needing a proprietary transfer protocol to use my expensive player is very off-putting - and the fact that it's a Microsoft protocol makes it feel even more dirty 
.
Audio Codecs - One thing that immediately drew me to the W was support for the Xvid video codec. Xvid is a free (as in speech) MPEG-4 video codec (compare to the proprietary Divx codec). I am a strong proponent of xvid and typically encode all of my video content with it. It just feels nice to you a free codec as opposed to something that's closed - really, it does, try it! Unfortunately, the audio codecs available on the W are not as open. You essentially have two choices: MP3 or WMA (oh, and WAV... but c'mon...). WMA is a Windows-only codec (which, in my personal opinion, sounds fairly poor) and MP3 is a proprietary format which may or may not be illegal in the US (because of it's proprietary nature, several organizations have claimed royalty rights. While LAME may not be strictly an encoder, any binary implantation of the mp3 format without a license would be against the law). Ideally, I would prefer to use an open codec for my audio such as Vorbis or FLAC, but alas, it seems the world is not ready to handle it. Vorbis and FLAC tend to get very little respect outside of the FOSS community. It's a shame, too, I would love to keep my entire media library free of proprietary formats, but neither my iPod nor the W will have it.
Those are the two big gripes I have so far with the W. I must say that it is a great little gadget and for the past few weeks I have owned it, I've made extensive use of it. But please, Creative, show some love for FOSS.