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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. You can
change this setting to make the player work better with Media Player as
well. Like their new Cube 2, the US2 is also podcastready.
Podcasting will be covered in detail later in this review.
Bundled Software
**click to enlarge**
The
included software consists of the video/picture conversion software, MJPEG
video player and Lyrics Manager.
Video Conversion
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The
video conversion software will basically convert your video files over to
motion JPEG files with the extension of .msv. You can load and covert
MPG, AVI or WMV files. Now, in our previous review of the Cube 2, I
commented on the fact that the software does not support batch conversion.
This is not really the case. While it may not appear to support it,
you can select multiple files when browsing for the one source file.
This does work well and will allow you to convert multiple files with ease.
On
a high-end system, converting an MPG music video took just over 30 seconds.
The software first converts the video before attempting to convert the
audio.
As
mentioned in the review of the Cube 2, you are looking at roughly a 50%
smaller files when converting MPG files. This was slightly less when
converting WMV files.
Image Conversion
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The
included software will also allow you to convert your image files for
viewing on the US2. However, as mentioned in the recent review of the
Cube 2, it is not really necessary unless you want to load smaller files.
During testing, all of the JPG files I transferred over without conversion
displayed just fine on the US2.
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.
Lyrics Manager
Once nice feature of the US2 is its lyric's support. The included CD
also comes with a Lyrics Manager software application that will basically
allow you to link lyrics to a particular song.
**click to enlarge**
Now, after reviewing a number of players that supported lyrics, I will say
that none of these lyric managers are easy to use. Many novice users
will be quite lost and unable to properly mark lyrics on a file.
Fortunately though, mobiBLU does include some detailed instructions.
The main thing to remember is that you must sync the lyrics to the song
file. This takes a bit of time and patience, but if you do it right,
it works quite well. Remember though, you must enable lyric support of
the US2. The instructions given are incorrect though. The enable
LDB option is in the settings menu under display.
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