hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0034.txt

Episode: 34
Title: HPR0034: Cowon D2 Review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0034/hpr0034.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:32:09

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is Chess Griffin.
In this episode I'm going to do a little review of the Kwan D2 portable media player.
This is a device.
It's been out about a year and I've actually had a couple Kwan products.
I had an iAudio 5, which was just an audio player that also had a radio and the ability
to record.
But the Kwan D2 is a new player, like I said, it's been out about a year or so, but it's
a great little device and I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about it and just
tell people about it.
It's especially friendly to people who use operating systems other than Windows or OS
10.
The Kwan D2 is a video and audio player.
It's a pretty small device.
I'm looking at mine now.
It's slightly bigger than square.
It's rectangular, but it's maybe 3 inches by 2 inches by a half an inch, something like
that.
I think it weighs a little over 3 ounces.
It's really small and it's got a nice color screen of, I think it's a 2.5 inch video
screen display, 16 million color display.
The resolution is 320x280 and it's a touch screen as well.
For the audio, obviously this will play MP3s.
It plays OGS, it plays Windows media files, it plays FLAQ, Waves and maybe one or two
other codecs.
I think it plays AACs as well, not the DRM version from the iTunes music store, but if you've
got other audio files in AAC format, you know, Und DRM, I think it will play those as
well.
The video portion, well, the sound on the audio is great.
I mean, it's just fantastic.
There's a couple of good reviews of the Kwan out there and I'm not much of an audio file,
but I mean, it sounds really good to me and I've had one iPod a long time ago, many years
ago, that has since died and I think this audio quality of the Kwan's is at least equal
to the iPods if not better.
But the real cool thing about this device is the fact that it can play videos, I think.
There's a lot of video players out there, but the size of this device and some of the
features really make it stand out.
For the movies, it'll play in AVI format and I think Windows media video format as well
as far as the containers go.
For the codecs, I think it will play MPG4, again, Windows media and I believe it plays X
Vid and Divix, although I haven't tried those yet, but I'm pretty sure it does.
I have played MPG4 files in the AVI container and it plays really well.
Again, the resolution is 320 by 240, 30 frames a second.
If you encode those files with MP3 audio, then of course the audio portion will play
just fine.
I'll come back to the video stuff in a few minutes about encoding.
It'll also record, line in recording, external mic support, voice recording, it's got a built-in
little teeny tiny microphone.
I've tested the built-in microphone and it sounds okay, nothing really great, but I think
the line in recording and the external mic support is supposed to be very good.
The only downside to the audio recording is that it records in Windows media format.
My old iAudio 5, I'm pretty sure, would record in MP3 format.
I also have an iRiver 790 that records an MP3 format.
In fact, that's what I'm recording this episode on right now, is the iRiver, but it does
do the recording.
And being able to record off the radio is pretty nice.
It'll also show photos, as you would imagine, being a video player, so you can drop some
photos, JPEGs, I think, and I don't think there's any limitation on the size or the quality
or anything.
It also has a pretty basic text viewer, and I think it supports up to text files up to
two megs, and it works okay, you can read the text, although it's obviously pretty small.
As I said, it does have a built-in FM radio, as well, which is pretty nice.
As far as the built-in memory, this comes in in three different sizes currently, in terms
of the internal built-in memory, two gigs, four gigs, and eight gigs, obviously flash
bass.
It's not a hard drive bass player.
It also has what's great as an SD card slot, and I think it will also take MMC cards.
I don't have any of those, but I do have a four gig SD card.
And with a firmware upgrade, it'll take SD HC cards as well, so you can conceivably
get this thing up pretty big with a lot of extra space.
It is USB 2.0, high speed, in terms of connection, so that works pretty well.
File transfer speed is like 35, 40, something like that, so it's not super fast, but it
works.
The battery life is pretty good.
They rated it 52 hours charge.
It's got a built-in rechargeable battery, so it doesn't take AA or AAA or anything.
It's a rechargeable battery.
They say 52 hours, I've probably gotten at least 40 hours, and I've probably gotten pretty
close to 50.
That's for audio playback.
If you watch the videos, obviously the battery life will go down.
I think they rated it 10 hours for video.
The package, when you buy it, it includes an AC adapter.
There's a little teeny-tunny plug on the side that you can use, and you can plug it in
with charge using the AC, just wall outlet.
You can also charge over USB.
It charges much faster with the adapter than USB.
I think a full charge on the adapter only takes like three hours, and with USB it might
take seven to ten hours, something like that.
But it works fine.
As I said, it does include the AC adapter, USB cable.
It also has TV out, which is kind of cool.
I haven't tried that yet.
It doesn't come with a TV out cable, though, but you can buy that.
It will play, and some of the stuff I've read is that it plays pretty well if you attach
it to a TV or something.
That works really well.
As far as encoding videos, as I said, the resolution is 320x240, and you've got to get it
in an AVI container, MPEG4.
What I've done with pre-existing video that I've had, a couple of different ways you can
do it, you can obviously just manually use any kind of tool, you know, transcode or something
like that to encode.
There's also a little script out there, and I don't have a link for it, but I'll try to
dig one out for the show notes.
But if you just Google around for Kuan D2 video encoding script or something like that,
you should come up with it.
I actually found it linked to in the Ubuntu forms, and there's even a way you can make
it a Nautilus script, so if you use Ubuntu and you use the Nautilus file manager, Nautilus
has the ability to have sort of drop-in scripts that appear in the right-click context menu.
So when I did that, I would right-click on a video, and it would say encode to Kuan D2
or something like that, and it just worked great.
I've got several videos on my SD card, and they play really, really well.
No pixelation, it looks really nice, and it plays very smoothly, no chopping this or
anything like that in the playback.
You know, a couple other points, one nice thing about it is that obviously it just
mounts as a USB-mash storage device, so that's great if you use Linux or BSD or something.
It does come with some software, sort of their Kuan's version of an iTunes type of music
jukebox software, but I've never used it, so you certainly don't need to use it, and
it won't run on Linux, it's just I think it's Windows and Mac software.
But since it's just USB-mash storage, it's very easy to drag and drop files, create
folders, create a folder structure however you want.
Within the UI, you can create playlists and all of that, I tend to just navigate through
the folders, and that plays just fine.
Speaking of the UI and the touch screen, the UI in all the Kuan products I've found to
be, not as easy to use as maybe the iPod, you know, you have to press a lot of buttons
to get to the song you want to play or something, but once you get used to it, I mean it works
pretty well, you know, it just just takes getting used to, I guess.
It does have the ability to resume where you left off, that's a setting I noticed was
not enabled by default, so by default it'll not save your place, but you can do that.
You can also save bookmarks, and you can have multiple bookmarks in video or audio files
that you can come back to later.
The other nice thing as far as users of Linux and BSD and stuff like that is, and I think
this is awesome, I wish all players did this, but firmware updates are simply drag and
drop, it's great, it works really well, basically what you do is you download a zip file with
the firmware from the Kuan website, you know, unzip it, and it will may have, you know,
a few different bin files for the firmware, and there's easy instructions, you basically
just, you have to do it a few steps, so basically you would drag the first bin firmware into
the root folder on the Kuan, and I think you then disconnect it and reboot it, and then
you do it with the second bin file, so there might be three or four bin files in any one
firmware upgrade, so you've got a drag and drop and reboot three or four times, but it's
really painless, and it works perfectly from Linux, that's what I love about that, rather
than having to, I think for my old Kuan, the I audio 5, I think I had to do the firmware
flashes through Windows, so that was a real pain, but this doesn't require that, so it
works great, it's a great little device as far as cost, like I said, I got the 4-meg
version, and I think it was maybe 160 or 170, something like that, it comes in, I believe
two or three different colors, I got the black one, I think there's white and maybe silver,
I'm not positive with that, the screen is, like I said, it's a great screen, very, you
know, it's a great resolution, it looks really good, it's obviously very susceptible to
fingerprints, it came with a screen protector, it's not even really a screen protector, it's
like, you know, when you buy stuff, it comes with a little sticky thing that it's got a
little tab that you can peel it off, the first time you use it, I've actually left that
on until I have time to actually buy an actual screen protector, just to kind of protect
it, I also bought like a little rubber kind of, you know, skin for it, you know, to protect
it a little bit, I've dropped it a couple of times, and the skin has protected it just
fine, so that hasn't been a problem, I think it comes with a carry strap and the, you
know, stuff like that, but I mean, that's, I don't ever use that kind of stuff.
The other thing I'll mention is the little cover that covers up the USB port and the VGA,
the TV out and the AC adapter plug, the whole, you know, you plug the AC adapter in, it's
got a little plastic cover, and you got to kind of pick it off with your fingernails,
and then it kind of extends out on a very thin little plastic, you know, string almost,
and it's very, it's, that's the only part of this device, it seems very flimsy.
The rest of the device seems really well constructed, and the buttons are responsive,
and the user interface is very responsive, but overall, I mean, I think the device is
made well, except for that little cover, but I don't ever really open it up too much
other than to charge it, I guess, and I do all my stuff, I usually just use the SD card
that I pop out and pop in an SD reader on my computer and just drag files onto that.
So anyway, overall, it's a great device, I highly recommend it for the cost and for
the features, I think you get a lot, I think I like the fact that it's very operating system
agnostic, doesn't require any proprietary software or anything like that.
If you listen to fair play music, which I believe is DRM music, Windows, DRM music, I don't
know, I don't use that, but I think it will play that, so for people who do have that
kind of stuff, it'll work, I'm pretty sure, but I don't have any DRM music to try that
out with.
Anyway, it's definitely a great little device, big thumbs up, check it out and play around
with it.
I don't think they're in any stores, I got mine on new egg, but there may be a few stores
where you can find it, but a very cool little device, and if you get it, I hope you have
fun.
Alright, thanks for listening.