The evolvement of MPx player
2008-08-13

                                                    The evolvement of MPx player

There is no doubt that almost no one does not hear the MPx in this period. And nearly most youngsters ever or now own one or two players of MPx, MP3 or MP4 and so on.

The original player of MPx is MP3. The immediate predecessors of MP3 were "Optimum Coding in the Frequency Domain" (OCF), and Perceptual Transform Coding (PXFM). These two codecs, along with block-switching contributions from Thomson-Brandt, were merged into a codec called ASPEC, which was submitted to MPEG, and which won the quality competition, but that was mistakenly rejected as too complex to implement. The first practical implementation of an audio perceptual coder (OCF) in hardware (Krasner's hardware was too cumbersome and slow for practical use), was an implementation of a psychoacoustic transform coder based on Motorola 56000 DSP chips. MP3 is directly descended from OCF and PXFM.

Several years ago, MP3 was very popular by the consumers, because of its portable and small shape. But, with the fast development of the digital products, more and more consumers are not satisfied with the MP3 functionality can only listen to music, and at that time MP3 also can not support a lot of formats. So, to address this issue, another portable media player called MP4 was launched. In fact, MP4 was originally known as MPEG-4 Part 14, because the official filename extension for MPEG-4 Part 14 files is .mp4, thus the container format is often referred to simply as MP4. MPEG-4 Part 14 was based on Apple’s QuickTime container format. It is most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, MPEG-4 Part 14 allows streaming over the Internet. Some devices advertised as "MP4 players" are simply AMV video capable MP3 players, and do not play MPEG-4 part 14 or any other MPEG-4 format. Now, the player market is developing rapidly and the market of MP4 has been consolidated and expanded due to continuous innovations in industry. MP4 has become the main portable media player in the worldwide market. A report of Chinese MP4 player market in the first quarter of 2007 shows that 478,800 sets of MP4 worth 708 million were sold in the first three months of this year.

However, now, more and more consumer don’t satisfy the MP4. Users find a lot of troubles when they play the MP4. The major trouble what they encountered is the video file format convert. Most of MP4 players can only support MPEG (AVI) video format. Other popular video formats such as .RM and .RMVB file does not use directly. They should firstly find the correct convert tool to convert them to the suitable format which MP4 player can support when the player these files. To solve this problem, many manufactures began to upgrade their products to appeal it,and finally comes MP5 player.

Mp5 player is much like MP4 player. But, it also has a large different between mp4 player. Firstly, at the audio aspect, it can support audio playback such as MP3, WMA, FLAC, APE, AAC, PLAY FX sound effect and others, the sound effect performance is very excellent. Then, for photo browse function, it support automatic photo browsing in JPEG, BMP, GIF format. Built-in microphone, it can support long time voice recording. Built-in flash memory as 1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB, it can also support external memory TF card which the storage capacity is 512MB-2GB. Compatible with WIN2000, WIN XP, VISTA system, via USB cable, this MP5 Player can connect to the PC via it’s high speed USB2.0 transmission port and you can share, copy, move the file between the different storage medium easily and freely. With RMVG technology, it is different from any MP4 player.

 

Currently, there are already various portable media player manufacturers in China claiming to produce MP5 players, the successors to MP4 players. As the term of MP4 player is still largely a marketing term and depends more on anecdote talks rather than any solid standards to define its criteria, the definition of MP5 player varies greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer.