Athena CF Enabler vs CF Magic

[dre_mer]

I've read through-out these forums bits and pieces about these 2 applications. Yet I was just wondering what end-user PRO's & CON's were.....does one dominate over the other or are they about the same?

[cliener]

Wow, you are dredging up an old thread with that. IF the CS site is still up you can read just about everything on this topic there. If you are considering purchasing one over the other then I suggest you do your homework and review what clie is used and what remarks are made for apps.
Presently, CF magic is sold on Palmgear for $16.00 and you can review and ask questions at www.pdascent.com/forums and Athenas is sold at Palmgear and they have a site at www.athenaamerica.com however you must contact them directly with questions after you purchase it for $27.00
The first site has an open forum with support questions and a forum for before purchase questions. I use the CF Magic myself. It was written for the older clies and will not work with the NX73 or NX80. It does work well with the NX60, 70 and NZ90. You must get all the updates from the Sony MS though and you will still require an MS stick. You can read all this for yourself though. Hope that helps you out.

[cliener]

I just have to say this...for about the hundreth, millionth time. Read before you buy anything. There is a guy on the www.pdascent.com/forums that keeps plugging another driver (athena). What he doesn't realize is that the guy who wrote the CF Magic is the SAME guy that wrote Athenas driver (minus) whatever lines they may have changed after they parted ways. His gripe is about MQV and MPEG files. The original gripe is with Sony and not releasing the drivers for movies in the first place. You would have had to follow this evolution of cf drivers from about October of 2002 (I think?) The guy is ayasin but all this was on the original CS so if he is new to clies and the nz90 then he wouldn't know this. He should have just read the forum (open forum for giving info BEFORE buying) but I guess he didn't. They will delete his post and then he will rave about that because they pay for their website and don't promote other drivers. So please, if you are considering using CF Magic...READ the info before you buy. Some people have nothing better to do than complain. :)

[zwergnase]

cliener is CF-Magic's (secret?) agent in this forum.
He's also quite a ranter and raver himself and next time he buys a defective product, I hope the customer support is just going to advise him "well you should have just read all the posts on all relevant forums on the net to try and find a clue about that problem before you spend your $$$".
Some people have nothing better to do than to be off topic all the time :rolleyes:

My own experiences with CF-Magic have been very(!) mixed.
First, their user support is by far not all its cranked up to be.
Their user forum is as close to DOA as it gets, both in terms of response time and quality of reply.
Athena on the other hand responds to support e-mails 7 days a week (in my experience).
Athena's product works a lot more reliable than CF-Magic (which crashes every time I try to view/play a movie from my CF card).
But Athena has that one big draw back - that even a soft reset will disable the driver.
Not sure why they choose that brain dead design, as they could have left the auto-disable feature for a hard reset, or by holding down some button during reset.
In any case, it is quite tiresome having to always enable Athena after every reset, and right now I got so much installing going on on my CLI that I have resets happening quite frequently.
Athena also doesn't allow to specify card settings individually.
Its an "all or nothing" approach with them.
But on the other hand, Athena plays movies just fine from the CF-Card.

CF-Magic has a lighter foot print on your PDA, as it doesn't require manual activation all the time. It plays MP3s fine, but you can forget anything like playing movies. I'm not even sure if it records movies OK.

All in all, the picture is very mixed here.
If Athena would ever get around to improving the way their driver is activated, I'd switch back in an instance.
CF-Magic would be superior if they'd solve the movie issue, but their "support" already told me "no way Jose".

[cliener]

cliener is CF-Magic's (secret?) agent in this forum.
He's also quite a ranter and raver himself and next time he buys a defective product, I hope the customer support is just going to advise him "well you should have just read all the posts on all relevant forums on the net to try and find a clue about that problem before you spend your $$$".
Some people have nothing better to do than to be off topic all the time :rolleyes

My own experiences with CF-Magic have been very(!) mixed.
First, their user support is by far not all its cranked up to be.
Their user forum is as close to DOA as it gets, both in terms of response time and quality of reply.
Athena on the other hand responds to support e-mails 7 days a week (in my experience).
Athena's product works a lot more reliable than CF-Magic (which crashes every time I try to view/play a movie from my CF card).
But Athena has that one big draw back - that even a soft reset will disable the driver.
Not sure why they choose that brain dead design, as they could have left the auto-disable feature for a hard reset, or by holding down some button during reset.
In any case, it is quite tiresome having to always enable Athena after every reset, and right now I got so much installing going on on my CLI that I have resets happening quite frequently.
Athena also doesn't allow to specify card settings individually.
Its an "all or nothing" approach with them.
But on the other hand, Athena plays movies just fine from the CF-Card.

CF-Magic has a lighter foot print on your PDA, as it doesn't require manual activation all the time. It plays MP3s fine, but you can forget anything like playing movies. I'm not even sure if it records movies OK.

All in all, the picture is very mixed here.
If Athena would ever get around to improving the way their driver is activated, I'd switch back in an instance.
CF-Magic would be superior if they'd solve the movie issue, but their "support" already told me "no way Jose".


Correct me if I am wrong, this is the NZ90 forum and your gripe is with a product that addresses using the cf slot with the NZ90? That would make it on topic.
I am well aware of your wanting them to write something that uses MQV (which is what the driver Athena sells uses) but the PDAscent driver uses MPEG, recommends using MPEG, and even instructs how to use MPEG (see the FAQ?)
The same guy wrote both but isn't with Athena, he is with PDAscent. That is one good reason why Athena isn't going to make any significant changes to the driver. The people there didn't write it. If they could have made any changes they would have by now don't you think?
CF Magic isn't going to make any changes to theirs either, they have stated this and given reasons why. btw, ayasin does other things besides clie related, PDAscent stuff. I don't know what Athenas turn around time is on responses, don't really care as I don't use their driver, but the responses on the PDAscent forum are seemingly pretty fast also.
Yeah, I like the product. Seems like a lot of people like it too (counting downloads on the other sites that sell it). I actually started posting on CS about something to ShellyBelly but at that time everyone was screaming about Sony not releasing any drivers for the cf and then ayasin wrote the one for Eruware, then after they split up, he wrote for PDAscent. Seems like you want something that isn't written yet. So why don't you just write one? Or you could just contact ayasin and pay him to do it. In the end, at this time, you have 3 options, athenas, hacks or cf magic depending on the model of clie you use. Hard choices but Sony is the reason there are cf drivers now.
I have come across a few defective items in my time, and I usually READ all I can before I buy anything so I know I can use it. I like to be able to use whatever I spend my money on. Also, I didn't mention any names in my previous post, but you pretty much stepped up and raised your hand on that.
So are you saying the product is defective? I am asking in reference to your saying "the next time cliener buys a defective product...". You have been angry about this since before CS became 1src and that just seems a really long time to be angry about anything (barring really personal stuff). The rest of your post (minus any personal swipes at me) may prove really helpful to anyone considering the two products. As I have said before, read up on them, make your decisions based on what you will use them for and how you will use them. Then purchase...or not. :)

[zwergnase]

cliener:
Correct me if I am wrong,
Yes you are wrong and thus you do stand corrected.
This is an NZ90 forum and therefore questions about NZ90/CLIE specific drivers are most certainly "on-topic".
And unless you show me your deed to this forum, you are in no position to tell anyone otherwise anyway.

but the PDAscent driver uses MPEG, recommends using MPEG, and even instructs how to use MPEG
Wrong again, and you ain't >aware< of anything here.
Most certainly not of the fact that Athena doesn't >use< MQV anymore than CF-Magic uses MPG.
The issue here is the missing Cache in the CF-Magic implementation.
That causes their driver to be unable to handle the much higher data stream in the MPEG-4 encoded MQV files, and thus they have to fall back to Sony encoded *.MPG files, which can only handle MPEG-1.
Athena plays both just fine, because of the internal caching.

Also, I didn't mention any names in my previous post, but you pretty much stepped up and raised your hand on that
Aha, ha, ha. So those where nameless insults then?
Do those count any less? Anyways, the reason why PDAscent doesn't make any further improvements to their CF-Magic driver is not that its already so perfect, but that they can't get their hands on the internal OpSys specs from Sony. Some licensing (fee) issue I suggest.
And I repeat, next time you get a defective product, don't even bother with the customer help/return merchandise #. Just blame yourself for not having spend the required # of hours online, doing any and all research about the product.
And no, CF-Magic's add text on Handango did *not* mention that it couldn't handle MQV files propperly!
And me wasting my time being angry at you???

Get a life man!

What I was ticked off about what PDAscent's response time and that was lousy indeed. The failure of CF-Magic to play MQV files is just as much a (-) point as is Athena's stupid behaviour to disable itself after every(!) reset, w/o any way to auto-enable it again . That shouldn't take to much coding effort to improve (maybe with a pop-up message "yes/no" box).

Fact is that neither product is really professional grade and it looks to me as
if Ayasin simply took a few short cuts to many when he tried to re-package his old CF driver software into a magical new outfit.

[cliener]

Feel free to write a new and improved driver Zwerg. Like I said, Sony isn't going to release the code. That is why the first driver was written. Pestering either Athena or Pdascent isn't going to make them write another driver. It isn't cost effective. Guessing at what is the problem with CF Magic isn't going to win you any points with anyone either. My suggestion to you is use the third and only other option you have. That would be Pelacas hacks.
As for me, you don't know me, there are very few on this forum that do. In fact, there is only one for sure that knows who I am, and possibly Reggie and Joel because they have isp access for identity. So stop with your insults k? I read both this forum and PDAscents. The PDAscent one is for questions about how to use the driver and for constructive input. They have given you timely answers so I don't know why you are complaining about their answer time unless it is from the Handango issue you posted about on CS. Was it indeed Pdascent that wasn't answering you? Or was it something that had to go through Handango but didn't? :)
As for whether or not you follow the suggestion for using MPeg 1 instead of MQV, that is totally up to you. It IS suggested in the CF Magic FAQ which has been suggested you read (yep, read their forum too) and you probably will find yourself ignored as to your raving about wanting another driver written using Mpeg4. PDAscent isn't going to write another driver. If they had seen it as productive they would have written one for the newer clies but they had discussed it and with the alternatives and the small market they decided it isn't worth the time. More so now that Sony isn't putting out anymore clies.They have moved on, like ages before you ever brightened their day with your posts. So have a nice day. Use the Athena driver if it works great for you (cache as cache can) Wish you the best. :)

[zwergnase]

cliener:
Pestering either Athena or Pdascent
Nobody is peskering either one by simply pointing out product shortcomings and asking about improvements.
And if you'd read my replies on PDAscent, then you'd also know that both size and image quality differences between MPG-1 and MPEG-4 (MQV), make the MPG-1 suggestion ludicrous.
Regardless whose identity is hidding behind >cliener<, your fierce loyalty to CF-Magic contradicts any claims of objectivity from your side here.

And my solution to the movie storage problem is neither a no-name driver "hack" whose author can't even be found any more, nor a degraded picture quality and size MPG-1 monster.

This is my solution for both the storage capacity and the "VCR on the road" issue.
http://www.archos.com/products/prw_500570.html

Combined with the CF/MS reader writer for this baby (and the Sony MF/MS adapter), I can now swap up to 80GB "on the fly". And thus watch my movies on both devices w/o any bad compromise regarding quality
http://www.archos.com/products/prw_500422.html

Now go and clean that one up my dear :)

[cliener]

$799.00 was enough clean up on its own. Just glad you found something you can be happy with. :)

[zwergnase]

Actually I got mine for ~$600.-- and if I compare that with the $500+ for a 2GB memory stick pro, then I'm still fine off here.
Just the opposite of "being taken to the clieners" :)
80GB disk plus 10GB in chip storage capacity makes me roadworthy anywhere in the world :D
Wether it be Athena or CF-Magic.

[cliener]

$600.00 isn't a bad deal. I can't remember the last time I got $200.00 off of anything other than a car. Again, glad you found something you can be happy with. :)

[bike1]

The CF Magic FAQ is unclear on whether the recommended data rate of 192kbps for MPEG-1 is a limitation of the CF Magic software, the CF card interface, or the Clie itself.

It obviously can't be the Clie because I have a Clie NZ90, which plays 24fps, 300-600kbps Xvid movies very smoothly from a memory stick pro with the TCPMP player and lightspeed overclocking to 265mhz.

Does anyone know the max transfer rate of movies from the CF card with either CF Magic, CF Enabler, or the Pelaca drivers?

Thanks,
Bruce