Why can't a 1GB mp4 player stores a 700MB CD of MPEG?

Answer 1

It starts with an unfortunate conflict between true gigabytes and metricized gigabytes. See, back in the days when computers were new, kilobytes were defined as 1024 bytes because 1024 is a much nicer number to work with in binary coding. That resulted in megabytes being 1024 kilobytes and gigabytes being 1024 megabytes, so one gigabyte should be 1073741824 bytes. However, around the time hard-drives were approaching 1GB capacity, some lame-brained individual had the bright idea that if they redefined the whole kilo/mega/gigabyte conversion so that 1 gigabyte would equal 1,000,000,000 bytes, they could then claim to have the first 1GB hard-drive available on the market, even though they really weren't any bigger than their competition. That stupid stunt stuck, and now hard-drives are sold in metricized gigabytes, but software is still written to count them in terms of the original definition. So, your 1GB player probably won't register as a true 1GB capacity to start with, but closer to 950MB. And that's assuming that they even gave you a full metric gigabyte, since many times you'll get something close (usually on the low side, since that costs less) and they'll just approximate the capacity to the nearest round number.

Then, to make the player function at all, it needs to have firmware, which is like a computer's operating system. That will eat up a portion of the available capacity. So, if you plug your player into your computer, erase every music/video file from it, and check the total capacity vs. the available capacity, you'll see how much of the drive is taken up by the software that makes it function as anything more than a glorified flash drive. It sounds like the available capacity will come in shy of 700MB, which would prevent it from being able to load the contents of that CD.

Finally, one other possibility is that you have other stuff filling up the drive, like songs or documents. It seems a bit strange that you'd be losing around 250MB of capacity just to the firmware, so you might want to check on that as well.

I wouldn't feel too bad about the loss, since it gets much worse with larger capacities. My 320GB hard-drive only reads as a 300GB drive. That "missing" chunk is almost as big as the total capacity on my iPod (which clocks in at around 27GB, BTW).