iriver L-Player 8GB Multimedia Player - 2.0 Color TFT LCD Screen

Comment:
We bought this as a way to record for our multi day conference. The conferences are in 2 3-1/2 hour sessions with an hour break in between. The only drawback to this product was the battery life. even with taking advantage of the hour break to plug-in, I still didn't have enough battery life for the last 1/2 hour of the afternoon events. So don't plan on using it for an all day conference unless you have access to a power source as there is no way to have a backup battery. Other than that it was wonderful.

Comment:
The iriver is a pretty good media player. The edge buttons feel a little flimsy, but not too bad. The interface is easy enough for my 6-year-old to get the hang of pretty quickly. Video playback is very smooth. Battery lasts for 3 hours or so for video, a little longer for audio. I use a Mac and it took my quite a while (days) to find a video encoder that would give me video that this player would work with. I ended up using the free, open source ffmpegX utility and its ffmpeg XviD AVI encoder. I actually kind of hated this little thing until I finally found that, then it was all sunshine and mermaids.

Comment:
I bought this to replace my old MP3 player and as a simple .txt reader but I find I am using it as much for video as for music. With several feature films, a dozen TV shows, a dozen audio books, several dozen radio dramas, and a dozen music albums my drive is only two thirds full. The software for converting videos is easy to use and reliable. Feature films compress to 400Mb and a ''one hour'' TV episode to 100Mb. I find viewing on the two inch screen pleasant and intimate. I found the MTP OS impossible since I could not figure out Windows Media Player so I reset the device and chose the MSC OS which permits drag and drop file management. I use the included iRiver software to transfer files, make the video conversions and create playlists. This is all very easy and I did not even have to read the manual to figure it out. The unlimited book marks for audio, video and text are wonderful. The interface is intuitive and the ''D-Click'' buttons are very nice.