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Installation
The mobiBLU Cube 2 does have the option of installing as a separate
drive on your system, without the need for third-party software to gain
access or transfer files to the player. In a WinXP system, it labels
the drive as "PodcastReady", one of the features this player does indeed
support and one that will be covered thoroughly in this review.
Bundled Software
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Many may wonder, after taking a thorough look
at its features, how the hell does it support both picture viewing and video
playback? Well, the product does include their own software that is
able to convert both with ease to supported formats. Let's take a
closer look at their bundled software...
Video Conversion
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mobiBLU remarkably manages to add video support to this tiny player.
However, it only supports .msv files, which is not a common file extension.
Basically, they are just motion JPEG files. Fortunately, the bundled
software allows you to easily convert your videos files to this supported
format. During testing, I threw in a variety of files to see how well
it would convert them. I was able to convert MPG & WMV files without a
single issue. Unfortunately, the software currently does not support
conversion of AVI files. Converting your videos is as easy as choosing
the source and destination. That's about all that is needed, unless you
want to play with some of the quality settings available.
Unfortunately though, the software does not support batch conversion so
you'll have to convert your videos individually.
On
a high-end system, a music video can be converted in just under 35 seconds.
That's pretty damn fast. I only wished they had batch conversion
feature available.
What about file size? Well, since it is not a common format, many may
wonder how large the files are. As an example, a high quality MPG
music video with a file size of 42MB was only 19MB after conversion.
Based on all conversions done, you're looking at 50% smaller files.
But
how well do videos play on such a small device? I'll cover this
thorough in the performance section of this article. Let's first take
a look at other features the software offers.
Image Conversion
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The
software also allows you to convert your photos. However, on top of
the fact that photo viewing on a .66" screen that is roughly 68x48 pixels is
completely pointless, the conversion doesn't work very well. Yes, it
will significantly reduce the size of your image files, but quality is
sacrificed. The conversion will name the new files with a .msj
extension but for those wondering, you can transfer your jpg files (any
size) over to the player and it will indeed read them. I was a bit
shocked by this. With that said, if you do plan on loading images, it
is best to use an image editing program over the conversion tool provided or
simply just load your JPG files directly to the player.
MJPEG Player
Also bundled with the conversion tool is a
MJPEG mini player. It can be handy to use in order to test playback of
all converted video files in this format.
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