Investing & Financing: first Flash-media Hardware Player

Have you thought about quality issues? ID tagging? When I think Flash music I tihnk crappy music on myspace.

I don't really think space is an issue, with bigger and bigger drives being introduced all the time, most pople will be satisfied with an 80 gig ipod, if not a 20.

Posted By: Eric

but you'll be hard pressed to sell a single unit to an Audiophile who knows his stuff and wants quality sound.

Proud Founder of YGG

Thats what people said about mp3.
I converted all my music on my laptop to .flv, and using good quality headphones, I seriously can't hear a difference.

Posted By: wesbos

with bigger and bigger drives being introduced all the time, most pople will be satisfied with an 80 gig ipod, if not a 20.

Then why do they keep making bigger capacities? Because there's a demand for it. There were people who believed multi-gigabyte harddrives were unnecessary!

Posted By: Travis

There is quite a noticeable difference between flv and mp3/aac audio.

Are you telling me I can't believe my own ears?

Is there a way to modify Ipods internal software?

But it would be great on portable players - which is all the Ipod is....
I'm talking about a portable player...

Posted By: Eric

Posted By: Toupee

But it would be great on portable players - which is all the Ipod is....
I'm talking about a portable player...

I don't get it...

I use my portable player (iPod) on my Onkyo home system and in my car w/Bose - both let me hear all audio imperfections.

Proud Founder of YGG

I think what he is saying is for those people that go running with their iPod, etc... although I can't speak for audio quality.

I just hooked up my laptop to my home stereo, turned it way up, and couldn't hear a difference between .flv and .mp3. Then again, its not a $10,000 stereo system. And Im not an sound aficionado. And neither is 99% of everybody else.

I agree with everyone else that changing the file type would change the quality.

Although you have a good idea, at heart, with only a few hundred dollars as good faith it will be hard for your to be at the forefront of anything.

To truly revolutionize an established market it would take tens of millions of dollars. I mean look at Blu Ray. Sony, the largest electronics company in the world, couldn't even revolutionize the market with their obviously superior Blu Ray product.

With the strangle hold Apple has on the personal music device market you will be hard pressed to find anyone to risk tens of millions to back your idea. Don't get me wrong it's a good idea but your are going to have to develop it a lot more than what you have to get anyone to even take a second look at it.

I mean there are some serious technological issues to deal with here regarding the actual implementation of the device, a marketing plan and lets not forget the all important production which would cost millions.

By all means pursue your idea but go about it in a realistic and objective manner. You can't get offended every time someone criticizes your idea. If you get a little cranky over our criticisms you would cry like a baby in the board room. They would ask you serious questions that none of us here would know where to begin to answer.

If you want to seriously pursue the idea we are all willing to help you explore and develop the idea but bring some serious questions and have things thought out in advance.

I personally can hear a difference between the two compressions. If you were to open both files in an audio app (don't think you can open flv tracks) you'd see a huge difference in the levels (ie. details).

The issue comes in that it's nothing revolutionary. The iPod was, a slightly better compression isn't.

But like I said, creating something to work with the iPod whether it be software or hardware, to enable people to encode/play back flv files.........could work for the geeks out there.

The majority of our population knows the term "mp3 player" but doesn't have a clue what an mp3 actually is.

A plugin for Wordpress that automatically converts my audio to flv so it downloads 4 times faster and uses less bandwidth, that could take off. Or it might not. But it would still be a safer bet than an flv handheld player.

I used TotalVideoConverter to convert my mp3's to flv's. You can download it free from download.com. Its cool cause you can convert in batch - all your mp3's at once.

Youtube is proof that flash has mass appeal/adoption.

Travis nailed it. I would go the "widget route" and see what works from there.

YouTube is NOT proof of mass adoption for FLV in the hardware sector - it's proof of mass adoption for web-based media, just as Travis said.

Personally, I can't tell a difference between Mp3 and FLV - most of my listening is done via headphones. I cannot vouch for higher end systems, but there is no reason to doubt Eric or others.

Try the web-based stuff first and see what your consumers want. I can tell you right now that LeTutor's estimate of "tens of millions of dollars" is too low; Microsoft was throwing many times that amount at Zune, which was a complete failure.

Actually, I was thinking of patenting it. Not trying to compete with Apple and Microsoft's production capacity.

FYI,
to save you the trouble of checking this out, I use:

Allok Video to FLV Converter to convert my mp3's. It has a free trial at Download.com (TotalVideoConverter seems to be on the blink right now). Be sure to convert to .FLV!
Then I used GOM Media Player to listen to it, which is also free at Download.com (and also happens to be a great all-around player, I might add!). But you could use any flash player to listen to it.