Help out someone who knows nothing about MP3 players. PLEASE.

[Zavulon]

Against any reasonable instinct, I'm going to spend my tax refund on an MP3 player for my nephew. What I need to know is the following:

1.) How much space does a four-minute song take (or, if easier, how many megs does each minute of music take)?

2.) How much space, on average, would a single episode of a half-hour sitcom take on one of the players that plays video instead of just music?

3.) Is there any such thing like a half hour of one show (depending on format, region, whatever) taking up significantly more space than a half hour of another show? My nephew is a native French speaker and some of his favorite stuff isn't available in stateside Best Buy outlets, so this is something I have to know.

4.) I realize that I should be able to figure this out by the answer to the second question if the answer to the third is 'no,' but I'll ask anyway: on average, how many gigs are necessary to store an entire season of sitcoms if the season is 22-24 episodes?

5.) Are there any brand names you can heartily recommend or vehemently steer me away from, and would you be so kind as to tell me why you like or dislike the brand? Of particular interest to me is if the accompanying software is user-friendly or user-hostile, since my sister is even more computer-illiterate than I am and it's a good bet that I'll have to load the kid's music and TV onto the player myself. You should know that I'm not so hot with computers myself when considering the user-friendly / hostile question.

I hate to bother the Lounge with this question, but quite frankly I can't think of a better forum in which to ask.

Many thanks in advance -

Zavulon

[Omphaloskepsis]

1. Some answers...

1. Depends on the format of the song. For a 1 minute of audio in mp3 160(VBR) it is about a meg.

2. I just converted an episode of Scrubs to play on my iPod and it is about 85 megs.

3. There are so many video formats that this can't be easily answered. A H.264 MP4 file is going to be smaller than a Divx file.

4. About 2Gigs if you use the format the iPod uses.

5. I have always used iPods since I am on a Mac. They are by far the most popular MP3 player out there. The software you use to connect it to your computer is called iTunes. It is as easy as any other software to sync mp3 players. Some complain that it is bloated but four Windows computers in my house use it and don't have any problems.

[REP]

2. answers:

at 320 kbps, a 4 minute song is about 9.4 MB; at 192 kbps about 6.5MB etc

1/2 hour TV show (non-animated) is about 500MB (in TV format/size, not reformatted for iPhone or iTunes)

2 seasons of the Venture Brothers (resized for iPhone) + 1/2 hour non-animated TV show + 5 15 min. cartoons resized for iPhone = abt 7.5 GB

forgot to say: iPod, iPhone and Apple TV, baby.

[PeaceNikki]

3. 5.) I love my Zune!

I personally find the software for it more user-friendly and less of a resource hog than iTunes.

The 30 GB players are about $200.