Pandora As A Media Player

[Starclopsofish]

Hello, I've been following the Open Pandora project for a few years now, and after initially deciding against picking one up due to the price, the more I think about it, the more I feel the $500 is justified and the device would fill a lot of my needs. (Going through airport security with a 15" laptop isn't fun.) (The USB port can power a hub with mouse + keyboard, right?)

Is anyone using the Pandora as their primary media player? I've heard good things about the sound quality of the Pandora, but how practical is it for pocket use? Is there an option for it to continue playing with the lid closed? If so, what kind of battery life does it get just playing music? I've heard that the Pandora gets 10 hours with most features enabled, is this accurate? What about under full load?

Also, could anyone who uses it for this purpose comment on its performance in general?

Sorry for the annoying questions!

 

[Pickle]

Is anyone using the Pandora as their primary media player? I've heard good things about the sound quality of the Pandora, but how practical is it for pocket use? Is there an option for it to continue playing with the lid closed? If so, what kind of battery life does it get just playing music? I've heard that the Pandora gets 10 hours with most features enabled, is this accurate? What about under full load?

Also, could anyone who uses it for this purpose comment on its performance in general?

Sorry for the annoying questions!

Ive used my pandora a little bit for playing audio media and it works fine, you can even play streams across the internet (with the correct audio software). Sound Quality
Closing the lid will should have no effect on any running processes. All it does it turn off the backlight (saving power).
You probably could get 10 or hours or more just playing music. If you were not using wifi, had the lid closed then power consumption would be pretty low. You could underclock but I believe the cpu clock does not have much effect on battery life. The battery killer is the wifi (better though with the latest driver), so if you stream something then it not likely to last as long.
Full load depends on you meaning, if your running 3d apps or heavy wifi then yes it will be effected. Full loaded cpu doesnt effect power consumption much.

Bottom line, pandora's battery is one the best out there, if you just running mp3's off the sdcard then it will last quite a while.

 

[skeezix]

Pandora is an excellent audio/video player, though I'd argue more for on belly or on desk than in pocket per se.. Its larger than an ipod. But if you want to queue up 15 hours and shove it in your jacket inner pocket say, its great. Very good audio reproduction, amazing battery

(disclosure, I'm on pandora team but I'm being honest

Jeffphone

 

[sebt3]

Hello, I've been following the Open Pandora project for a few years now, and after initially deciding against picking one up due to the price, the more I think about it, the more I feel the $500 is justified and the device would fill a lot of my needs. (Going through airport security with a 15" laptop isn't fun.) (The USB port can power a hub with mouse + keyboard, right?)

Is anyone using the Pandora as their primary media player? I've heard good things about the sound quality of the Pandora, but how practical is it for pocket use? Is there an option for it to continue playing with the lid closed? If so, what kind of battery life does it get just playing music? I've heard that the Pandora gets 10 hours with most features enabled, is this accurate? What about under full load?

Also, could anyone who uses it for this purpose comment on its performance in general?

Sorry for the annoying questions!

If you're only after a good media player, have a look at the archos products.
But if you want more, the pandora is totally awesome as a media player. The 10 hours for real (easyly reachable). You can set all kind of effects on the output play many format (see audacious, also I'm its porter so i'm biased a bit ;P)
To justify it's price you'ld need to have a look at it's others features imho.
It is pocketable is you have large pockets (and strong enough for the weight). I'm using an holster for it myself (my suits dont like it much)

 

[skeezix]

Suits?

-1



Jeffphone

(who is back to work tomorrow so expect me back in irc/web at lunch :0)

 

[gruso]

Holsters though?

+1

 

[pder]

One thing that has always bothered me is that all of the media players such as the stock mplayer, vlc, panplayer, etc all suffer from tearing. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is either- is a new Xorg driver needed?

However one route I had some success with was using notaz' SDL, setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the path of the updated SDL and running mplayer -fs -vo sdl file. While this eliminated the tearing, it seemed to make any videos that required scaling look slightly bad. However playing a 480p dvd image looked absolutely flawless. Omitting -fs caused the SDL library to return an error complaining about requiring more memory.

 

[Hooka]

I use my pandora hooked up to some old polk audio speakers (they work like shit on everything but the pandora... but they don't require any batteries or power ) at work for music... usually get about 12-14 hours use split between 2 days before it runs outta juice... That's with the lid closed and no wifi... with wifi enabled I usually can get about 8+ hours (nowadays I mean with a usb wifi dongle cause the built in wifi works like shit for me and I have a micro 802.11n stick that works AWESOME!) As for 3D but no wifi, I was playing mario64 for 6+ hours minimum a day for awhile there and would still have about 15% left on the batteries when I plugged it in for the night, but my nub broke a long time ago and I haven't really bothered since. I really enjoy the screen quality for movies, and I've had few problems throwing anything I have at it (although I don't have 1080p blueray rips, just backups of my DVD's and HD vid caps from tv of course).

 

[Esn]

Hello, I've been following the Open Pandora project for a few years now, and after initially deciding against picking one up due to the price, the more I think about it, the more I feel the $500 is justified and the device would fill a lot of my needs. (Going through airport security with a 15" laptop isn't fun.) (The USB port can power a hub with mouse + keyboard, right?)

Well, that depends on how much power they draw, I guess. The Pandora can power up to 500mA (the maximum allowed according to USB standards). More specific info can be found here:
http://pandorawiki.org/USB_reference
http://pandorawiki.org/USB_compatibility_list

Is anyone using the Pandora as their primary media player? I've heard good things about the sound quality of the Pandora, but how practical is it for pocket use? Is there an option for it to continue playing with the lid closed? If so, what kind of battery life does it get just playing music? I've heard that the Pandora gets 10 hours with most features enabled, is this accurate? What about under full load?

The sound quality is very good if you're using headphones, and kinda lousy if you're using the built-in speakers (which don't have much of a lower register to speak of).

MinAmp is the best player to use. You can play with the lid closed and use L/R to switch tracks, or open the lid slightly and press the "space" key (which is near the bottom of the unit) to pause it.

There are lots of other music players ported that have more features, but MinAmp is much more suited to ease-of-use on the Pandora; the others are more meant for a full desktop rather than a handheld.

The battery life does last at least 10 hours under full load. I've never tried using it just as a music player for an entire battery cycle, so I couldn't say if it's much different. According to the Pandorawiki, someone measured mp3-playing as being 17 hours, and lid-closed as 16-23 hours depending on if wifi is turned on (the screen takes most of the energy, so that makes sense).

Also, could anyone who uses it for this purpose comment on its performance in general?

Sorry for the annoying questions!

MinAmp works well for music (just put your music in folders; it will treat each folder as an "album". Nice and simple). The default GNOME MPlayer is pretty good for watching videos. It can be navigated quickly just by using the keyboard; TAB, ENTER, ESC, SPACE and the d-pad, plus a few R+key shortcuts.
However, video viewing is still entirely software based (if I recall correctly) so high-resolution videos will stutter. And there are a few obscure formats like .asf that play much slower than they should. Theoretically the hardware could do much better, but nobody has gotten around to improving that yet.

In summary, as an audio player it works very well, as a video player, less so at the moment, particularly if you tend to keep high-quality video files. If you tend to keep lower-quality files or can afford the time to convert them, it's fine. Non-HD Youtube-quality things will play fullspeed.