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DivX DVD Players Arrive
division21 writes "Geeks rejoice -- DivX Enabled DVD Players finally surface! (With all the goodies: MP3, SVCD, etc.) I remember when MP3 compatability appeared back in the day -- And it looks as though DivX Compatibility could be a real possibility for the mainstream ..." And if you can live without the compression, cherrypi points out this surprisingly favorable review of perhaps the cheapest (under $200) portable DVD player with a built-in screen.
Ok, yeah, I love Penny-Arcade, but DivX ;-) is not to be harkened with that Circuit-Shitty format.
Get a modchip and install the XBox Media Player. It'll stream DiVX/AVI/MPEG/SVCD/VCD from a PC (or off the internal HD) and display on your TV.
Very nice.
Many will also end up supporting Ogg Vorbis, since it's become a popular audio encoding format for DivX's. (Or so I hope.)
Ogg Vorbis isn't really supposed to be used for DivXs. It's a VBR system, when AVIs require a CBR audio compressor, otherwise the video gets really screwed up. Now if there was a way to get ogg to do CBR....
You better tell all the encoders that. Most new movies are encoded with ogg, and have a .ogm extension. Lower bitrates, better sound, and more room left on the CD(s) to increase your video bitrate.
Unfort not. The article says,
"The KiSS DP-450, set for release in late October, will enable playback of videos encoded in DivX versions 4.xx and 5.xx."
I have about 20 3.11 movies that would be useless.
I think XviD is aiming to be a standards-compliant MPEG-4 codec...if that's the case, the info on this player says it'll play MPEG-4 as well as DivX;-), so XviD ought to work as well.
(XviD is a Good Thing, especially in light of what DivXNetworks has done to hijack development (spyware-infested codecs, etc.). I've been archiving Good Eats with XviD for a little while now...the quality is good enough for reference usage, and fitting ~4 hours of video (12 episodes) and all of the accompanying recipes (in HTML) on one CD is cool.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
DIVX SOLD OUT TO MPAA.
DRM will be embedded within DiVX. It's pointless now.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/04/224621 9&mode=nested&tid=126
and
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-875988.html
k.
--even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
Divx3,4,5 for various reasons including lower quality and copyright issues, most serious mpeg4 encoding is migrating to xvid. Once some Ogg issues get worked out most mpeg4 encoding will be done in Ogg/Xvid. Will this player support those codecs or just be a hundred dollar piece of obsolete junk?
;)
These were my thoughts exactly. I recently switched from the hacked Microsoft (DivX 3.11) codec to XviD. I have no desire to support DivxNetworks and their closed source codec. Let's face it, the name DivX really belongs to Circuit City and the fame belongs to the original hacked Microsoft codec. DivxNetworks started out as Project Mayo but closed the source on their codec once they realized they were stealing enough of the "DivX" thunder, err, marketshare.
XviD is what DivXNetwork's codec would have been if Project Mayo continued. It is largely based on the original open source code and will continue to be improved. Last I checked, the latest version of DivxNetworks's codec includes SPYWARE.
If I download a DivX 5.x movie that XviD can't play, it gets deleted. I don't do a lot of movie downloading anyway - a lot of the movies on P2P networks are poorly encoded and take forever to download. I do however have access to a great professionally mastered library of recent and older movies for a modest per-movie fee of around $4.00. Due to the DMCA, I can't reveal this source, but I'm sure if you live in an urban or suburban area you'll have no trouble locating a similar source.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
IT kind of depends on how it does the decoding. If it just has a general purpose CPU that is fast enough to handle all the decoing, like a Power PC 750 or something, then it is possable that this could be done since all teh decoding would be software based.
However I think it is far more likely that this device uses hardware dedicated to the sole purpose of decoing video/audio. Basically the MPEG 2/4 decoding is probably done by a DSP dedicated to that purpose. Well that means that the chip can't do anything but MPEG 2/4 decoding, and cannot be changed.
It's kinda like a 3d graphics card in your PC. Any modern 3d card is much, much, much faster than any processor you can find. The GeForce 4 can pull around 1 trillon opertaions per second when it really gets cranked up. However, it is a specific DSP, all it does it push pixels, and it can't be reprogrammed to do anything else. Your CPU, while much slower, is general purpose and can be programmed to do theoritically anything.
Now I don't know for sure what this thing uses, I was unable to access the information on their site, but I suspect it is a couple of dedicated chips to do decoding, not a CPU. In that case, it woul not be updatable. I could be wrong though, CPUs are cheap enough these days in theory they could have a moderatly powerful one (probably on the order of an 900mhz P3 or so) and then just do the decoding in software.
From what little I can gather, that portable seems to be a shinco OEM. My guess is it's probably the Dvd-960 model which has been sold by RCA for around 400 dollars in the states for some time (I think it can be had for as little as 300 now though). I own one of these units and I must say it's quite impressive for the price, ESPECIALLY if you're into downloading anime (fansubbed and unlicensed of course, nothing illegal) and you'd like to watch it away from your computer. I actually bought mine JUST for vcds/svcds and consider the DVD capabillity to be a bonus. Just don't buy it for the mp3 playback, it bites (all songs start about 4-5 seconds into it, no idea why it skips first few seconds, and the on-screen display only shows 8.3 filenames).
Of course, if you design a special pared-down motherboard for it, the costs would go down further. It could be tiny, because it wouldn't have to really do much--so it could fit into a simple DVD-player-sized case. My question is: why aren't computer distributors falling over themselves to make these? A chip that can do DVD/DivX/Xvid/Ogg/APE decoding in software can be had for about $20. Special hardware decoding solutions will just seem moot at this price, given the usability limitations they impose.
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall when divx first came out and people said there would NEVER be a commercially available stand-alone divx player becuase divx 3 was cobbled together from bits of microsoft code and thus violated their copyrights. Since then it became an open source project and has been rewritten from scracth. Hence, although versions 4 and 5 would be legal, a divx 3 decoding player would not be.
Have a look at the DSP Village over on the Texas Instruments web site. There are whole families of DSP chips that are reprogrammable and accellerate media functionality in all sorts of ways. Even your example of the GF4 - it is specialized towards 3D accelleration, it is customizable with the Cg language extensions. I won't even get into crazier ideas like shipping a FPGA and putting the algorithms on it (the general purpose CPU is probably cheaper). This is the case today, but maybe not tomorrow. This device probably does use some crummy chipset, you're right.
What people should be asking is why the hell the folks at ATI - who already make exactly what you want, by the way, with their all in wonder cards - can't get their act together and write some decent, bulletproof software for windows 2k or linux (I don't really care at this point, if it's solid software). A general purpose PC with more power than you could ever need for this is about $500 away. Just add the card (maybe with some goodies like support for HDTV) and you're off to the races. Or just get a projector.
The problem with that right now is stability. That ATI software is not very stable or good, doesn't integrate DiVX and scheduling functionality, doesn't want to work with my satellite reciever, etc. Get some good software in there and you have something.
My $0.02.
..don't panic
DivX on CDs is a great way to record and distribute home video. My parents want to see their grandkid. I have a camcorder. Trouble is, they live halfway around the planet. It's easy to duplicate and mail DivX video on CDs, and it would be great if my not-all-computer-savvy relatives owned DVD players that happened to play DivX.