OSNews

The FM radio requires headphones plugged-in in order to work (they work as an FM antenna), although you can enable the external speaker if you don't want to wear earbuds (and use the earbuds only as an antenna and not as audio output). By long-pressing the OSD button the PMP goes into "preset" mode and then by long-pressing the joystick towards the right side it automatically scans and saves radio stations channels. Reception is not too bad (it automatically found and stored 16 radio stations in my area). Then, by short-pressing the joystick towards the right side it will just jump to the next preset. If you press the Record button it will record the FM stream as an 128 kbps mp3 (but at only 32KHz). You can pause and continue recording and it will all get saved as a single mp3. By slightly pressing down the Power on/off slider button it will turn off the LCD so you can listen to FM Radio without wasting battery life needlessly. The SV-10 is able to support all three kinds of FM radio bands (USA, Europe and Japan).

The audio support of the unit is pretty good, I found the sound quality very good. There is EQ support (preset and user-definable). It's a bit boring if you have a huge list of music to wait for the hdd to wake up and do a quick read of the disk each time, but sound quality will pay you back. There is no mp3 tag support (there is an option for ID3 but it doesn't seem to work) but the SV-10 is able to drive headphones pretty loud (as I am writing this I have the volume to 15 out of 40 scale and using my MDR-XD400 Sony headphones and the SV-10 is still able to produce loud music). There is lyrics support, shuffle, repeat and ability to put your LCD to sleep after XX number of minutes. You can also setup an A->B portion of a song that will continuously play over and over again. There is also a facility for "bookmarks" and "favorites" but using those is pretty tricky because of the quirky interface discussed above. There is no support for playlists other than creating folders with specific songs in them or using the "favorites" feature.

The SP-PMP51C supports a number of media formats: AVI, DivX, XviD (experiemental, some XviD videos we tried failed), MP3 (with VBR support), WMA (non-VBR), OGG, JPEG, BMP and GIF. According to the manufacturer it supports Divx (v3.x,4.x,5.x) and XviD with mp3 audio encoding up to 720x480 (DVD quality). It only supports one kind of ASF: mp3 audio CBR with its video encoded in ISO MPEG-4 V1. In essense, the only popular video format endorsed for playback is DivX, but we wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, the codec they use does not support well mp3 VBR decoding, and this results in out-of-sync A/V playback. Only CBR DivX files play well and the problem is that 95% of the DivX (or XDiv) videos out there use VBR instead of CBR. You will have to use this or this (complicated) tips to transform your existing DivX VBR files to the expected audio format and for any new DivX encoding you are producing you will have to use either Mencoder or ffmpegX and specifically tell them to use CBR and DivX (instead of XviD). Windows users should use the SUPER free encoder and select the same settings as shown in my screenshot here (avi, divx, mp3, mencoder, 320x240, 4:3 (or 16:9), 30, 720, 44100, 64kbps). After encoding such a video file it plays fine. You can change the screen format to 4:3 or 16:9, go fullscreen, define bookmarks within a video or create a playlist with favorite videos, define A->B points, repeat whole videos, fast forward/backwards really fast on them (sometimes a bit too fast ;-).

The Image slideshow application is pretty good. It has transitioning effects, zooming support (using the... A->B button), repeat, shuffle, slideshow timing settings and rotating pictures in XX degrees or Auto ("auto" doesn't work very well, as it doesn't keep the aspect rations). Finally, by placing a .txt file on the /data folder you will be able to view it and use your PMP as a screen reader (and listen to music at the same time).

Finally, the battery life. This PMP has outstanding battery life, especially after we upgraded the firmware. It yielded about 8.5 hours of QVGA video playback (LCD brightness 2/10 -- bright-enough indoors), 6.5 hours of VGA playback, 12 hours of mp3 playback (with LCD off) and 15 hours of FM radio (with LCD off). These video playback times are much better than most PMPs in the market today, including the iPod Video.

In conclusion this is one of the most full-featured PMPs ever released, but the A/V out-of-sync problem on most DivX videos is a major one. This is a lot like buying a microwave without a timer. I don't understand why the Sorell engineers never found the problem, it seems to me that they only tested their product with a single encoder. Nevertheless, if you only going to use this PMP for recording, and encode all DivX videos yourself using the "SUPER" encoder, then this is an amazing value at $199 (use the promo code "GEEKPLUS" to buy the item for just $149). It has so many features and accessories that for the price it becomes unbeatable.

Pros:
* Camera with VGA recording
* FM radio with mp3 recording
* Audio recording as mp3
* Great accessory bundle
* Bright QVGA screen
* Responsive interface
* A/V recording/output
* Good battery life
* OGG support

Cons:
* Bad DivX compatibility
* Usability issues

Rating: 8/10

1. "SupportPlus/Sorell review, Page 1/2"
2. "SupportPlus/Sorell review, Page 2/2"