PIRACY ENABLING DEVICE, GO NOW!

[chronovore]

I just bought a ¥5600 dealy from the local electronics district. It plays MP3, JPEG, MPEG4, WMV, and a mess of other formats off of USB keychain drives or SD flash media (which it navigates by directory, through a browser), and appears to ignore region coding on DVDs. I am as pleased as punch.

So far it doesn't like the .MP4 files that can be downloaded from Google Video, so I am not sure what's up with that. It's hard to dislike a machine that lets me play all the DVDs I own, and not just the ones from a given region. Golly, gosh, darn it, I fucking hate region coding.

Correction: It, and most units like it, appear to support WMA, not WMV. Audio, not video. Crapx0r!

Comments

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Just noted that I hadn't answered the second question. It's a no-brand thing, most likely from some mainland-Asia factory. The casing bolts were screwed in /through/ the plastic covering that protects the paint job, so it has little ghostly wisps of stretched out plastic around each of the bolt-heads. The unit's LED timer has a red-orange-yellow light that swirls and illuminated circle when the DVD is played; just the right kind of non-ambient distraction you need in your AV rack when you're trying to watch a movie - WTF is that? "feng shui"?

The name appears to be one of those German double-s things, ßpiele or something, but the furigana it has accompanying it don't read that way. I'll double check from home and post that when I get more details about the format stuff. But there appeared to be a number of these kind of things with varying feature sets.

My biggest concern is that I may have inadvertently funded a prison-industrial complex through my impulse purchase.