The Philips GoGear ViBE Portable AV Player is both an excellent MP3 player and video player. Small and very light, this audio video player offers an impressive performance for a very convenient price.

Summary of the Philips GoGear ViBE features

The GoGear ViBE player features a 1.5” full color display that uses the SMV to play videos. The player can also be used specifically for MP3’s and WMA’s, and offers song title, artist, and album information. As far as storage capacity, the GoGear ViBE offers 4 GB of NAND Flash, for roughly around 900 tracks of music.

No Separate Charger or Headset Required

Included with the player is a pair of earbuds, as well as a mini CD-ROM offering device manager software and a Media Converter for Philips, if for example the user needs to convert MP4 files to a different format for the GoGear.

The player does not have a charger, or require a separate charger, but rather plugs directly into the USB port of a PC for recharging.

The Controls on the Player

The controls are fairly easy to work with, and after some initial experimentation with the player I was able to easily find music, recorded audio, and video on the player.

The only oddity I noticed was the absence of a specific power ‘on/off’ button, but after following the quick-start instructions I see how the system works, and I figure that buttons were simplified as much as possible considering the small dimensions of this player.

However, others have reported that the buttons are a bit stiff and general operation is a bit non-intuitive so may frustrate non-techies.

Video Review of the The Philips GoGear ViBE

For someone looking for a simplistic and very lightweight player that offers a decent amount of capacity for a very reasonable price, the Philips GoGear is a reasonable product.

The downsides are that video playback is more of a fun bonus than for serious use since the quality is quite low, and those that require their gadgets to be idiot proof may have trouble working with this player. However, these let-downs are relatively trivial given the price.

Philips GoGear ViBE Marketplace: Discounts & Prices

On Amazon
Available to buy at Amazon

On eBay:

Philips GoGear ViBE 4 GB Digital Media Player US $29.10   19 Bids Auction Ends: 2h 28m Make it yours…

Philips GoGear Vide 4GB MP3 Video Music player 4G Black US $38.99   0 Bid Auction Ends: 4h 4m Make it yours…

Philips GoGear Vide 4GB MP3 Video Music player 4G RED US $38.99   0 Bid Auction Ends: 4h 39m Make it yours…

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• Other portable audio/video players on WebTvWire
• The 5th Gen iPod Nano, a feature rich and lightweightalternative AV player from Apple.
• More portable audio/video players on eBay

Philips, the company that was not so long ago criticized for its patent that would stop advert skipping on DVRs, is now developing anti piracy technology that will help online video sites restrict use of copyrighted video.

The technology is able to take a digital bitstream “fingerprint” of videos and hold them in a library. Then when videos are uploaded to video sharing sites the fingerprints can be compared to copyrighted videos allowing efficient filtering videos to take place.

This would allow sites like YouTube to control copyrighted infringement on its site, but this could very well be at the expense of its users who may move to video websites who are out of reach of US copyright law.

The video fingerprinting technology could also be a very powerful weapon for the media companies worried about copyright infringement on sites like YouTube since they could request and probably force many video sharing sites to use such technology.

With copyright infringement out of the way the media companies could quite happily keep all their copyright content on their own YouTube clone that is currently rumored to be under development. This would leave other video sharing sites missing a lot of valuable video.

Video piracy is a hot topic at the moment with many startup companies such as Attributer working in the exact same field and Widevine Technologies developing technology to stop downloaded video from being copied.

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