11-19-2002, 10:49 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 3,060
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Content Upgrades From Mazingo
http://www.mazingo.net/pc/index.php
Mazingo has announced a few changes to their Mobile Entertainment Network, their service for downloading and viewing movie and television content on your Pocket PC. The changes include:
� A new $6.95 "one-day" pass. Download all the content you want over a 24-hour period.
� Download times are estimated and displayed during the sync process.
� Availability of discussion forums for people to discuss the service and ask questions
� Launch of Digital Video Package with more reliable and better video content.
� Launch of "Extra" & "Celebrity Justice" in the television and news category.
I've always wanted to try this service out, if not just to see if the video quality is very decent. If anybody out there uses this, I'd be interested to know what types of shows you download and whether you feel there's sufficient variety.
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11-19-2002, 11:38 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 48
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I was one of the "Early Subscribers" and get their Premium Content for free, and I can safely say the following things.
1) Their content selection is much, much better than anything AvantGo can offer.
2) As far as I can tell, there's no limit to how much you can download at once (compared to AvantGo's 2MB limit).
3) Their Digital Video Package is well worth it, with a variety of old movies, clips, and trailers to pick from.
I switched from AvantGo awhile ago and have never looked back since. 
-Kyle
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11-19-2002, 11:46 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 75
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Hi Kyle,
A few questions:
1) were you intentionally comparing apples to oranges to highlight the difference or is Avantgo capable of providing video streams? I just switched from Palm (where I used avantgo) which definitely couldnt do that! (at least to my knowledge) Can it for PPC?
2) what is the size of the video streams in MB/minute of footage? and, is it a standard file format or custom?
thanks!
TM
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11-19-2002, 11:50 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Dec 2007
Posts: 497
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Trokair
I was one of the "Early Subscribers" and get their Premium Content for free, and I can safely say the following things.
1) Their content selection is much, much better than anything AvantGo can offer.
2) As far as I can tell, there's no limit to how much you can download at once (compared to AvantGo's 2MB limit).
3) Their Digital Video Package is well worth it, with a variety of old movies, clips, and trailers to pick from.
I switched from AvantGo awhile ago and have never looked back since.
-Kyle |
I'm assuming you still get the premium content for free, but, with what you are getting, is it worth paying for. Also, are you running this from a storage card. I would assume the file sizes are huge and I would be kinda of leary of placing that much content on my device's RAM
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11-19-2002, 11:54 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 262
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Just like anthonymoody I'm interested in what kind of video file format is used and what the quality is like. I remember downloading a long time ago a free movie channel from Mazingo and in my opinion it was very poor quality, not comparable to other sources I've used for watching video on my pocketpc. I'm interested in learning if quality has improved or not.
So, I'm willing to pay premium $$, but only for premium content ;-)
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11-20-2002, 12:15 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 48
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Hiya everyone.
Anthony:
I suppose I was using the old "apples and oranges" comparison there. :P What I'm trying to get at is that Mazingo offers everything AvantGo does and more.
The videos themselves don't stream, they're directly downloaded to the Pocket PC, a Storage Card, or (the best option) a Reader if you have one. As an example, a 3 minute Weather Channel forcast takes up about 1MB.
ntractv:
Yes, I still get it. As for if it's worth it for what you get, I suppose that's all a matter of opinion.
On file sizes: Yeah, they're pretty big. I'm using a 340MB MicroDrive to hold some stuff now. The thing here is that once you're done watching something, get it off of your synced videos list.
denivan:
They use MPEGs. The Digital Video Package comes bundled with PocketTV.
As for quality, it's acceptable. It's about as good as you can get it without having massive file sizes.
-Kyle
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11-20-2002, 01:21 AM
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Magi
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 2,341
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Sometimes I feel like I always sound negative. If I do I'm sorry, but here I have to be.
The video content on Mazingo is largely the same as it has always been. The movies are all the same. They never cycle in anything new. It takes a donkey's age to sync. Even when using a card reader. Every once in a while I load this app back on my PPC and give it a go to see if it's worth it. Everytime I do I end up taking it off to make room for stuff I need.
I must admit my opinion is probably a bit tainted. I has some real problems caused indirectly by this app, and got absolutely deplorable customer support. The problem I had was it would take about a 1 1/2 minutes to open an Excel, or Word form when I had any Mazingo content on my storage card. When I contacted them about it they said "It's not our fault, it's an OS problem sorry. We have no plans to find a fix to this issue. We suggest you remove your storage card when you want to use Excel, or Word". I began hearing similar problems from many others so I decided to take all my woodworking knowledge I have and find a solution to this problem. It was also pointed out to me that people on their forum were asking for a fix to this problem, and were being ignored. They wouldn't even post that Mazingo could indirectly cause this problem, so many of their customers fumbled along with this problem with no idea that it was Mazingo that was causing it.
Well NON computer geek Dave found the fix, a very simple one (I guess that's why I was able to find it. :-) ) If you had an "ignore_my_docs file on you card, and you removed it the problem was solved. It took me several evenings playing around to find this problem, when Mazingo could have found this fix in minutes if they had only tried.
I couldn't believe how thankful some people were to hear of this fix. I think one guy even threw in a marrige proposal. :-)
So, every once in a while I take an opportunity like this to bad mouth them for the total lack of care they showed their customers.
Dave
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11-20-2002, 03:04 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 47
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I have to agree on the bad things.
They take way too much time to fix problems. Right now the MazingoDVP software is of beta quality. The transition from the old program to the new one was a nightmare and some things are still not resolved. Even worse, you need to have two programs installed on your desktop to also get the free text services.
I have mentioned elsewhere in this forum that the program was not capable of syncing, it just erased everything instead. So when you know that it takes 50 minutes to download my content (no movies and to a card reader), I think that that way of doing things is just a waste of bandwidth and time.
About content, some programs do cycle everyday (news, extra, etc.), but the music videos or the movies don't change. Oh..and it's US centric...Forget about the weather in Europe or things like that.
But there are some good things too. I think the quality of the videos is great. Frame rate is important to me and the mpegs are fluid. The resizing of cartoons works well most of the time.
We need a better software and more content.
The $7 for 24hours is a good idea, that way more people can experiment.
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11-20-2002, 12:50 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 232
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I definitely agree that the synching versus replacing files thing is a pain, and probably adds a LOT to the download time. Plus, I have occasionally had synch errors where I couldn't access any of my DVP files through Mazingo, even though they obviously downloaded... which meant the double frustration of having them download and not being able to access them, *and* having them take up all that useable space on my storage card.
I do like the weather channel updates, since I travel a lot and can choose multiple domestic cities, and having Extra and USA Today videos available is good too. Also, the daily "radio-show" type updates are great... sometimes more than an hour long!
However, it would be nice to get everything I want as far as digital content in one place. I currently use Mazingo, AvantGo (although I haven't yet bought into the 8 meg upgrade) and that new program called World Off-Line, which is pretty cool except it requires a manual synch and often doesn't get 50% or more of my links. I would ditch AvantGo and World Off-Line completely if Mazingo offered true synching and faster downloads... as it stands right now, I can't afford the time most days to synch my Mazingo content daily, which means any time-sensitive content needs to be in AvantGo, which synchs fast and reliably.
(On the other hand, if AvantGo offered a DVP like Mazingo does, and allowed a default install to the storage card, and got rid of the stupid size limit, I would drop everything and go solely to AvantGo, too!)
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11-20-2002, 03:08 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 307
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Mazingo as far as I know does not let you sync the web pages of your choice.
It is also buggy as some people have noted and the sync process is awkward. It does offer some features that are promising.
Avantgo is very reliable in syncing. You can generally sync your favourite web pages. You can pay a small fee to sync up to 8 mb. To sync content to a storage card, you have to tweak the registry. Why they haven't been able to include this in the program is baffling.
Sunnysoft World off Line and Handstory, are promising, but I don't find them ready for prime time yet. They need further versions.
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