Late last year, I spotted a deal that I couldn’t turn down. I was able to buy a Sandisk Sansa Fuze 4G player for about $30 USD. When these were first released in 2008, they were over double that price. I already had an iPod Nano, but I wanted video and photos, and the price of the iPod Touch was over my playtime budget.
If you aren’t familiar with the Fuze, here’s some info from Google Products:
Listen, watch and play all day with 24 hours of battery life and room for up to 2000 songs. The Sansa Fuze from SanDisk is your portable music machine with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of storage. Watch your favorite video clips on the Sansa Fuze’s 1.9″ color screen. Jam to FM radio with 40 preset stations, play with the built-in voice recorder, and share your photos wherever you go. Choose from five electric colors: blue, red, pink, black or silver. Incredible battery life in a 0.3″ thin device – the Sansa Fuze marks the next wave of music and video players.
In the past few months, I’ve enjoyed using it at work and play, but there are two things that I definitely don’t like about the Fuze. First, they used a proprietary connector, instead of using a mini-USB. Secondly, they force you to convert all your videos to a weird AVI format, which can only be created by their special Sansa Media Converter (Windows only).
There isn’t much that I could do about the connector, but I’ve finally found an excellent alternative to the Sansa converter, called Video4Fuze. It is supported in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, unlike Sansa’s lame converter. Now converting full length DVDs for use on my Fuze is as simple as creating an AVI file, then converting it with Video4Fuze. If you are a big fan of downloading Youtube video, the Video4Fuze utility also converts FLV and MP4 videos with no problem.