I have a number of issues with the media player. Issues I wish I did not have since a big part of why I bought this device was as an mp3/mp4 player.

1. The device does not play any of my winamp created m3u playlists. When I select a playlist it just says unable to find file.

2. There is no way to create custom video groups. Limited to film, videos shot on device. Want to have categories such as music videos, sports, etc. Having said that I don't even know how to change the category type of my videos. They all got transferred as film (which I assume the device does by default) and I can't see how to change that.

3. No option to play in full screen. Transferred videos of 640x480 to the device and they play with black borders on the side. Videos of 720x432 play in full screen. So I have to re-encode all the 640x480 videos. Would be nice if the device could give option to play full screen for these lower res videos.

4. The videos that played perfectly smoothly on my ipod touch have occassional stutter on this device.

5. Takes ages to list the videos and decades for all the video thumbnails to load up.

6. No portrait mode in the music player is really ridiculous. Anything which is a long list should have portrait otherwise you double the scrolling required for no good reason.

I dont think you need a specific card manufacturer. I think its more about the idea of reading the files from the card instead of from the onboard memory.

For what its worth, my card is made by SanDisk.

tried .pls-playlists? maybe they work.

I think .pls playlists worked for me... That's how I built my own playlist, using the XTerm, and the leafpad text editor.