Cowon D2 DAB

What is it?

It's a Portable Media Player (PMP). Basically, a small (78 x 55.4 x 16.6 mm), handheld media player with a touch-sensitive, 2.5 inch, 320 x 240, 24 bit display. It can play (or display) the following: Audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, WMA) Video (AVI, WMV) DAB radio FM radio Images (JPEG) Text files Flash

In other words, it's a glorified MP3 player. However, I bought it for the video functionality so that I can watch iPlayer videos, or legitimate DVD backups, on my long and boring commute to and from work, and to entertain my daughter on public transport when she would otherwise be running around and pressing every button she can find (it's amazing how quickly she'll calm down when Pingu's playing).

Mini review

It's a nice, well constructed bit of a kit. The display is bright and crisp, and the audio reproduction is very good. It's small enough that it can genuinely be called pocket-sized, with just enough weight to remind you that you're carrying it without it becoming tiresome banging against your leg when tucked into your shorts. I find the menus a bit of a mixed bag - on the plus side there are plenty of configuration options, but the location of some items can be a little counter-intuitive IMO. The device itself, and any memory card that is inserted, mount automagically in Linux (Ubuntu 7.04), so moving files to and from the device is quick and painless. The battery life is very impressive with Cowon claiming 52 hours of audio and 10 hours of video playback, although I haven't verified this for myself just yet. The unit can charge from the supplied AC adapter or, more usefully, through a USB cable when attached to a PC.

On the downside, remote control is (literally) not an option, meaning you'll have to fish the device out of your pocket to skip tracks or adjust the volume, which is tiresome but not annoying. Also, I sometimes encounter problems with the DAB radio that results in audio that's just plain weird .. it's not garbled, just a kind of echoing .. throbbing .. it's hard to describe .. the cure, for me, is to switch to a MP3, then back to the DAB and everything is fine again. Probably a firmware problem.

Encoding video

Here's what I do with mencoder to produce a D2 compatible file from an existing video ..

mencoder INPUT_FILE.EXT -o OUTPUT_FILE.avi -ovc lavc -vf scale=320:-10,expand=aspect=4/3,harddup \
-oac lavc -lavcopts vmax_b_frames=0:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128:vbitrate=256

.. which provides a quick and dirty encoding of the source material scaled for the D2's screen. Personally, I find the output acceptable, but if you want a higher quality encoding you'll have to experiment with the vbitrate value (try 2048) or go for a 2 pass strategy.

For making legitimate copies of my paid-for DVDs, I use this ..

mencoder dvd://1 -aid 160 -ovc lavc -vf scale=320:-10,expand=aspect=4/3,harddup -oac \
lavc -lavcopts vmax_b_frames=0:acodec=mp3:abitrate=128:vbitrate=256 -o OUTPUT_FILE.avi

.. where 1 is the video track I want and 160 is the audio track. You'll obviously want to put your own values in that correspond to your DVD.

Niggles

The D2 works well for the most part, but it does have one or two minor issues that it wouldn't hurt to fix.

I love the fact that you can charge the D2 using a USB cable, but it's annoying that you can't actually play anything while it's plugged in.

When you unplug the USB cable and restart the device, the audio player defaults to playing all the tracks on the device, regardless of what artist, album etc. you were listening to before you plugged it in. The device remembers pretty much everything else between USB sessions, so I don't know why it can't also remember what you were listening to.

BBC DAB stations are problematic. This has been covered in various D2 fora as it's a particularly annoying problem if it affects you. The crux of the problem is that telling the D2 to perform a DAB re-scan will very likely mean that any BBC stations you've found previously disappear from the channel list. Getting them back is not easy. The workaround for this problem is to make a backup of the DMBDB.CFG in the D2's SYSTEM directory when you do have the BBC stations, and restore the file when you lose the BBC stations.