Zune Home A/V Pack
by Zune
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List Price: Our Price: $29.95 You Save: $70.04 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $28.00 (click here) Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Zune Home A/V Pack
Customer Review: Works Flawlessly!!! Fits an 80 GB Zune!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This set is selling at best buy right now for a sale price of $60. It's original price is $100, so when I saw it here for $30 I was skeptical that it was quality material. Then I searched it online and I found a site that sells through amazon and they had it listed for $20 all I had to do was click on a link and it brought me to amazon with the price adjusted. I had to try it. I didn't realize until after I bought it that amazon has it listed for $30, so I really got a deal. I read the reviews before I bought it and I saw some people were complaining it didn't come in original packaging and they were disappointed because it comes in plastic bags, and they didn't want to give it as a gift that way. This is a ridiculous complaint. Any zune owner would be glad to receive this as a gift with or without the box. If your giving it as a gift just wrap it up nicely. If they own a zune the equipment will be recognized immediately and you will be praised for this wonderful zune attachment... I promise. Packaging is always discarded anyway. All of the items are authentic ZUNE items, they all have the zune stamp and design on them and also the quality is clearly up to microsoft standards. Why pay $20 more, some places even have it listed for as much as $70 dollars more, for the same thing. I do agree that the picture they have posted is misleading as to what your getting as far as the presentation goes. The picture should be removed, BUT I think it was put there to prove beside the packaging, you are receiving the identical items. I have an 80 gb zune and I read that in order to make it fit you have to remove the face plate which is fairly easy. This is unnecessary though because with a little tilt and a gentle push it fits firmly in the dock with the face plate on. You have to becareful though because it is quite snug and at an angle. Once you align the opening on the bottom of the zune with the dock everything should fit in nicely. If this scares you to do you always have the option of taking the face plate off. Also I thought the power cord was only included to charge your zune and I thought the dock was powered from your tv, so I never plugged it in. For the first few minutes after receiving it I couldn't get the dock to work and I thought it was broken, until I realized my mistake. It needs to be plugged in people...lol. I know this seems so obvious and if your reading this your thinking what idiot would make this mistake but I did and I'm not idiot. This is an honest mistake. I think the people who said this doesn't work didn't realize it needs to be plugged in. I hope this review helps someone. Take care.Customer Review: Important to know!
Summary: 5 Stars
Not all Zune models work the same with this Home A/V Pack. Here are three key facts one should know:
1. Only the Zune 8GB and Zune 80 GB are 2nd Generations models. The 4GB and 30GB models are 1st generation, but still quite good. All models support the audio features of the Home A/V Pack.
2. The Zune Home A/V Pack is an outstanding accessory that makes your Zune more useful - especially with the remote control. It's essentially a powered dock that charges your Zune and provides audio and video output cables to your TV and/or stereo system. The cables are standard composite a.k.a. "RCA jacks", the same red/white/yellow kind that come from a traditional VCR or video game. If you connect the Home A/V Pack to your sound system, you'll probably have to plug into the "VCR In" jacks to get the video feature. All the "CD In" connections I've seen on receivers don't include a jack for video because CD players are typically audio only.
3. When using the Home A/V dock, only the large capacity Zune models (30GB and 80GB) support the video output feature letting you view your Zune screen on your TV. Therefore, only the 80GB model has both the video output feature and the 2nd generation technology. Compared to the 30GB model, the 80GB Zune has significantly increased resolution which helps considerably when viewing digital pictures or videos.
All things considered, I recommend the 80GB Zune over the 8GB model. With 10 times the capacity plus the video output feature, it's well worth the price jump from $150 to $250. It really is cool to browse through hundreds of CDs with your remote and then play songs (or playlists) with the album art displayed on a big-screen TV with surround sound.
P.S. The only complaint I have with using the Zune Home A/V Pack is minor. Every time you place the Zune in the dock, you have to navigate the Zune's small screen for a while to reach the menu option switching it to video output ("TV output: On"). You can do this with the remote control if you can still read the small screen from that distance. The Zune can synch wirelessly to pull from your PC any new songs you have ripped from CD or downloaded from the Internet. Therefore, you don't need to remove and re-dock the Zune much if you just use it as a large CD jukebox. If you take it with you as a portable device, docking again is more of a nuisance if you want to see the video output on your TV.
Customer Review: Nice product, a tad pricey
Summary: 4 Stars
We bought this item (although not through Amazon) to go with the Zune 80 that we got for Christmas. Except for the slightly high price, I am very pleased with it.
True, as others have mentioned, you don't need this to connect your Zune to a home entertainment system - any audio cables will do. What this does allow, however, is the ability to charge the unit without being plugged into the computer. With the wireless sync capability of the Zune 80, Zune 80 GB Digital Media Player Black (2nd Generation)which is an awesome feature, I never take the Zune into our office where our main computer is. I just dock it in the living room with the entertainment system, and it is always ready for playing our collection.
The remote is adequate. Its best feature is the magnet. The remote is so small and sleek that I fear we would easily misplace it, but since it has a magnet, we just put it on the side of our refridgerator (any metal surface would do), and always know where to find it.
The other redeemeing feature of this is the video output, so that you can use the TV screen for selecting your music. This, paired with the remote, should make it very handy. We haven't tried this out yet, so I can't comment on it, but it seems like it should be useful and straight forward.
We bought our Zune as a replacement for our famliy CD carousel, which went on the fritz. Rather than spend the money on a new CD player, we put it towards a Zune. We are please with the decision, but the Zune would not get as much use with our stereo if it wasn't so easy to do thanks to this product.
My only compaint is that we initially found it very difficult to insert the Zune into the case, to the point that we wondered if we had the wrong product or needed a different plastic insert. Eventually we learned the trick, however, and after multiple insertion/removal sequences it is getting easier. I guess it was designed to be a bit tight so that the Zune wouldn't easily fall out, but they went a tad overboard!
Customer Review: A Good Deal fro Zuen Accesories
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this after the 80 gig zune dropped into the market place, and let me tell you, i am glad i waited. Not because it doesn't work, but because i paid such a good price for it. Apparently they fazed this unit out when they brought the new zune to the market. i know i had issues with using an older zune cable with the newer zune model ( i actually got shocked by it as i plugged the unit directly into a tv). I thought since direct into the tv wasnt working i would get this unit, and see if i could use an indirrect approach. Initially I started looking for a cheap zune cable to replace a broken one for my old zune 30 gig, and then i stumbled upon this for 30.00. When these first came out they were 90.00. I decided i would take a chance and that if it didnt work on my 80 gig i would use it for my 30 gig. Well outside of it seeming a little tight on the 80 gig (the plug in on the bottom is about a milimeter or two farther back than the 30 gig which makes adapting older stuff harder to the newer zune as far as stands go), it worked just fine. To tell you the truth i didn't really need all this as i had an adapter that i bought for 5.99 that i could have just plugged into the headphone jack, and used my recharge unit to do the same thing. But the cool thing was i could now change the music across the room, charge it, and i got the new cable i was needing, as well as a usb charger plug in. Overall it will work with the 80 gig or 30 gig, and i now have a good alternative to playing mp3's through my dvd player and having to turn on the tv to see which songs are playing. A good value, a good product, and if only Zune copuld figure out how to make it so you don't wipe out your library every time you plug it into your computer, than i would say over all their on the way of besting the regular ipod. Of course as far as the ipod touch goes, nothing they have comes even close right now. But something tells me that will soon all change. Soon meaning three or four years.Customer Review: Very pleased so far
Summary: 4 Stars
I just got my Zune dock at Circuit City and it works great except for a few problumes that I've had with the remote. My first A/V pack had a dead remote, it would not work even after a battery change, so I took it back. On my second remote the volume controls do not work, I tried plugging the cables directly into the zune dock and then tried plugging into the top of the zune but they still do not work but I can live with it.
Part of the video runs off the side of the tv screen, so any video that has subtitles might be a problem when viewing on the tv.
All and all I'm happy with it so far, It dose what I wanted to do with it, I put crazy video's that I find on the internet on my zune and I can easily show them to people on the TV. The best part is I can take the dock with me to my friends houses and easily show them the video's instead of waiting for downloading or lugging around my laptop.
On a final note, I do see a lot of people are having troubles with tv to zune resolution but the problem isn't with the Zune to tv conversion, its probably the compressed videos/ images you are using. Most of the videos that come with the zune are compressed so much that you can even see pixelation on the zune screen, I would guess (haven't looked at it yet) that the size of the video's are 320 pixels x 280 pixels and standard TV broadcast is almost twice that size, so any video that you put on your zune that is smaller that 620px x 480px is going to look like crap. If you have an HD TV, the resolution is even larger, above 1,000px. The movies on the Zune are compressed too keep file sizes low, if you want quality videos your going to have to buy a DVD and rip a copy for yourself and then you'll have quality. Most likely you won't find any videos on a website that look good, because they are compressed for web, under 400mb for a tv episode. A quality movie can be 2-4gb so keep that in mind when you view videos from your zune on the TV