What to look for when buying a portable player

[vcd_user]

I am new to this and thinking of buying a portable player for use during my travel on buses or trains. I like to get some advice from anyone on what to look or check before spending the money. My budget is under $200. Not sure if this is reasonable. One thing I do want is the player can play comon video formats without having to do any conversion. I read the advertisement and most of the player says that they support avi, mpeg, wmv and ... some other commonly known formats. However I was told by soem of my friends that a lot of time due to frame size or resolution, most of the files will require conversion before they can be played and time for conversion can be slow.
With my budget, I think the screen size will be limited to 3" and under which I think is OK. But time for conversion is more important to me because I am on the road a lot and cannot affort the time running the conversion job.

[orsetto]

Yes, conversion can be a pain. If this is an important issue for you, you may need to up your budget a little and consider one of the Archos units: I believe these have more flexible format playback than iPods or other $200 and below devices. If you assign a dollar value to the time you might have to spend doing conversions for a cheaper device, you might be able to justify buying a more-expensive portable. Personally, I chose to buy a used 5.5 generation video iPod for travel, primarily because of small size and the extraordinary battery life when it is run off an accessory 4-AA battery pack. The combined iPod/battery pack is so tiny it fits anywhere and weighs nothing, yet the screen is tack-sharp for one-person viewing and the play time is 12 hours using 4 AA batteries. In my case, this is workable because I did not begin creating portable video files until I got the iPod. For others like yourself who have large pre-existing libraries in multiple formats, an Archos type player could save a lot of headaches and also provide a larger screen size.

[vcd_user]

Thanks orsetto, I looked at the Archos web site. They have sversl models 105 - 705 models for gen 5. The 105 only plays WMV so that's out of the picture. 405 has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. Do I still need conversion with this resolution? Do I have to go to 605 in order to get what I want (i.e. play video files copied direct from my PC or DVD without conversion?