MP4 is Cheap

By Jian Shuo Wang on 2009-09-01 00:35 · New Tech

I am not a big fan of MP4, or movie or music, but today, Wendy surprised me with some good hi-tech toys - the MP4 players that have been popular in the market for several years in China.

Our favorite is a MP4 player with many functions - Mahdi. It has 4GB of storage (many has much bigger than this), and can play HD MP4, display pictures, play music and record sound. The screen is very big - like two typical mobile phone combined (I mean the size of two phone, not their screen). The price is 299 RMB (40 USD). It is not bad at all.

With the cost of LCD and chip/processing going down, you can easily spend several hundred RMB to get a pretty decent player.

The usability is terrible, compared to iPhone or iPod, but on the function side, comparable!

The next big question is, when the Chinese manufacturer start to work on the design and software to leverage the cheap hardware.

9 Comments

299 RMB for the Mahdi T556? if so that is very very good deal. Will be in Beijing this week, that will be item on my shopping list. Please suggest a few more reliable brand so I know what is good to buy. Thank you.

— loretta · 2009-09-01 22:22

For me, I can hardly think of an occasion to use this sort of device. Laptop/iphone/ipod can deal with all circumstances.

One headache for these devices are battery capacity. I guess it would have run out of juice before you finish watching the 4GB movie.

Most people are using MP4 mainly as a GPS navigator in their cars, where they can plug it into the cigar lighter. But this one seems don't have the GPS function.

— Adam · 2009-09-01 23:33

Wendy bought it as BestBuy in Shanghai

— Jian Shuo Wang · 2009-09-02 00:06

Thanks JS. Good suggestion will go Bestbuy in Beijijng.

— loretta · 2009-09-02 02:35

MP4 is an interesting category of media players. First of all, MP4 is not a media format, such as MP3. MP4 is just the name for the category which can play many video formats including RM (Real Media). Secondly, this type of player almost doesn't exist outside China. Maybe a few in Korea. But we don't see it almost at all in US. There may be only a handful of websites from which you can buy it here. Why is that? That is because there is no RM contents in US while most on-line video contents in China is coded in RM. So if a media video player can not play RM video, it is then almost useless. But why is RM format so popular in China? The answer is DVD piracy. Many years ago, when DVD disc was still relatively expensive, people had to copy DVD movies onto cheap CDs for sale. At that time using RM format people could compress a 2 hour movie from DVD into about 700MB file which could be then burnt onto a single CD, and the tool was much easier to use than those using other formats. Today we can see almost all online video contents in China are in RM or RMVB.

— JH · 2009-09-02 14:28

Does anyone know about the price of MP4 player, brand as "mumu" or "miumiu" (can't be seen clearly),the storage is 8GB and which is made in China?

Its screen is also very big and has many fuctions of it, good use!

— AliceFeng · 2009-09-03 13:58

loretta: you can also look for other good and reliable brands like Meizu, Ramos and Teclast. These few players has very good sound quality. It would say it is at par with the branded players and you just pay half of the price.

You might to take a look at Meizu M8, so called China iPhone that operates on WinCE :-) and Ramos T11RK. Both player is a touch screen player.

AliceFeng: Yes, MuMu is another good brand.

— DC · 2009-09-03 21:09

Thanks DC.

— loretta · 2009-09-04 00:11

Hi, DC;

You seem to know very well about those popular mp4 players made in China.

Around RMB300 can buy "Mahdi" with 4GB storage, then, can i say, spending about RMB600 to get the one called "MuMu" touch screen player (8GB)?

— AliceFeng · 2009-09-04 14:04